path: root/69497-0.txt

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 69497 ***

RECORDS




[Illustration:

                                            _Photo J. Russell and Sons._

1882. CAPTAIN OF H.M.S. “INFLEXIBLE.”]




  RECORDS


  BY

  ADMIRAL OF THE FLEET
  LORD FISHER


  HODDER AND STOUGHTON

  LONDON      NEW YORK      TORONTO

  MCMXIX




_Preamble_


The main purpose of this second book is obvious from its title. It’s
mostly a collection of “Records” confirming what has already been
written, and relates almost exclusively to years after 1902. As Lord
Rosebery has said so well, “The war period in a man’s life has its
definite limits”; and that period is what interests the general reader,
and for that reason all attempt at a biography has been discarded.

In our present distress we certainly want badly just now Nelson’s
“Light from Heaven”! Nelson had what the Mystics describe as his
“seasons of darkness and desertion.” His enfeebled body and his mind
depressed used at times to cast a shade on his soul, such as we now
feel as a Nation, but (if I remember right) it is Southey who says that
the Sunshine which succeeded led Nelson to believe that it bore with it
a prophetic glory, and that the light that led him on was “Light from
Heaven.” We don’t see that “Light” as yet. But England never succumbs.




PREFACE


Napoleon at St. Helena told us what all Englishmen have ever
instinctively felt--that we should remain a purely Maritime Power;
instead, we became in this War a Conscript Nation, sending Armies of
Millions to the Continent. If we stuck to the Sea, said Napoleon, we
could dictate to the World; so we could. Napoleon again said to the
Captain of the British Battleship “Bellerophon”: “Had it not been for
you English, I should have been Emperor of the East, but wherever
there was water to float a ship, we were sure to find you in the way.”
(Yes! we had ships only drawing two feet of water with six-inch guns,
that went up the Tigris and won Bagdad. Others, similar, went so many
thousand miles up the Yangtsze River in China that they sighted the
Mountains of Thibet. Another British Ship of War so many thousand miles
up the Amazon River that she sighted the Mountains of Peru, and there
not being room to turn she came back stern first. In none of these
cases had any War Vessel ever before been seen till these British
Vessels investigated those waters and astounded the inhabitants.)

Again, Napoleon praised our Blockades (Les Anglais bloquent très bien);
but very justly of our Diplomacy he thought but ill. Yes, alas! What
a Diplomacy it has been!!! If our Blockade had been permitted by the
Diplomats to have been effective, it would have finished the War at
once. Our Diplomats had Bulgaria in their hands and lost her. It was
“Too Late” a year after to offer her the same terms as she had asked
the year before. We “kow-towed” to the French when they rebuffed our
request for the English Army to be on the Sea Flank and to advance
along the Belgian Coast, supported by the British Fleet; and then there
would have been no German Submarine War. At the very beginning of the
War we deceived the German Ambassador in London and the German Nation
by our vacillating Diplomacy. We wrecked the Russian Revolution and
turned it into Bolshevism.

I mention these matters to prove the effete, apathetic, indecisive,
vacillating Conduct of the War--the War eventually being won by an
effective Blockade.




CONTENTS


  CHAPTER I
                                                                    PAGE
  EARLY YEARS                                                          1


  CHAPTER II

  FURTHER MEMORIES OF KING EDWARD AND OTHERS                          24


  CHAPTER III

  THE BIBLE, AND OTHER REFLECTIONS                                    38


  CHAPTER IV

  EPISODES                                                            50


  CHAPTER V

  DEMOCRACY                                                           69


  CHAPTER VI

  PUBLIC SPEECHES                                                     79


  CHAPTER VII

  THE ESSENTIALS OF SEA FIGHTING                                      88


  CHAPTER VIII

  JONAH’S GOURD                                                       97


  CHAPTER IX

  NAVAL PROBLEMS                                                     127


  CHAPTER X

  NAVAL EDUCATION                                                    156


  CHAPTER XI

  SUBMARINES                                                         173


  CHAPTER XII

  NOTES ON OIL AND OIL ENGINES                                       189


  CHAPTER XIII

  THE BIG GUN                                                        204


  CHAPTER XIV

  SOME PREDICTIONS                                                   211


  CHAPTER XV

  THE BALTIC PROJECT                                                 217


  CHAPTER XVI

  THE NAVY IN THE WAR                                                225


  POSTSCRIPT                                                         249


  APPENDIX I

  LORD FISHER’S GREAT NAVAL REFORMS                                  251


  APPENDIX II

  SYNOPSIS OF LORD FISHER’S CAREER                                   259


  INDEX                                                              271




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


  1882. CAPTAIN OF H.M.S. “INFLEXIBLE”                    _Frontispiece_

                                                           _Facing page_
  KING EDWARD VII. AND THE CZAR, 1909                                 16

  TWO PHOTOGRAPHS OF KING EDWARD VII. AND SIR JOHN
    FISHER ON BOARD H.M.S. “DREADNOUGHT” ON HER
    FIRST CRUISE                                                      33

  PHOTOGRAPH, TAKEN AND SENT TO SIR JOHN FISHER BY THE
    EMPRESS MARIE OF RUSSIA, OF A GROUP ON BOARD H.M.S.
    “STANDARD,” 1909                                                  48

  A GROUP ON BOARD H.M.S. “STANDARD,” 1909                            65

  A GROUP ON BOARD H.M.S. “STANDARD,” 1909                            80

  A GROUP AT LANGHAM HOUSE. PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN AND
    SENT TO SIR JOHN FISHER BY THE EMPRESS MARIE OF
    RUSSIA                                                            97

  SIR JOHN FISHER GOING ON BOARD THE ROYAL YACHT                     112

  SIR JOHN FISHER AND SIR COLIN KEPPEL (CAPTAIN OF THE
    ROYAL YACHT)                                                     129

  “THE DAUNTLESS THREE,” PORTSMOUTH, 1903                            160

  SOME SHELLS FOR 18-INCH GUNS                                       177

  LORD FISHER’S PROPOSED SHIP, H.M.S. “INCOMPARABLE,”
    SHOWN ALONGSIDE H.M.S. “DREADNOUGHT”                             208

  THE SUBMARINE MONITOR M 1                                          240




RECORDS




CHAPTER I

EARLY YEARS


Of all the curious fables I’ve ever come across I quite think the idea
that my mother was a Cingalese Princess of exalted rank is the oddest!
One can’t see the foundation of it!

                   “The baseless fabric of a vision!”

My godfather, Major Thurlow (of the 90th Foot), was the “best man” at
my mother’s wedding, and very full of her beauty then--she was very
young--possibly it was the “Beauté du diable!” She had just emerged
from the City of London, where she was born and had spent her life!
One grandfather had been an officer under Nelson at Trafalgar, and
the other a Lord Mayor! He was Boydell, the very celebrated engraver.
He left his fortune to my grandmother, but an alien speculator (a
scoundrel) robbed her of it. My mother’s father had, I believe, some
vineyards in Portugal, of which the wine pleased William the Fourth,
who, I was told, came to his counting house at 149, New Bond Street, to
taste it! Next door Emma, Lady Hamilton, used to clean the door steps!
She was housemaid there.

I don’t think the Fishers at all enjoyed my father (who was a Captain
in the 78th Highlanders) marrying into the Lambes! The “City” was
abhorred in those days, and the Fishers thought of the tombs of
the Fishers in Packington Church, Warwickshire, going back to the
dark ages! I, myself, possess the portrait of Sir Clement Fisher,
who married Jane Lane, who assisted Charles the Second to escape by
disguising his Majesty as her groom and riding behind him on a pillion
to Bristol.

The Fishers’ Baronetcy lapsed, as my ancestor after Sir Clement
Fisher’s death wouldn’t pay £500 in the nature of fees, I believe. I
don’t think he had the money--so my uncle told me. This uncle, by name
John Fisher, was over 60 years a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford,
and told me the story of an ancestor who built a wing of Balliol at
Oxford, and they--the College Authorities--asked him whether they might
place some inscription in his honour on the building! He replied:

                         “Fisher--non amplius,”

(but someone else told me it was:--

                     “Verbum non amplius Fisher!”)

My uncle explained that his ancestor only meant just to put his name,
and that’s all.

But the College Authorities put it all on:

            “_Fisher!_ Not another blessed word is wanted.”

One of my ancestors changed his motto and took these words (I have them
on a watch!):--

    “Ubi voluntas--ibi piscatur.”
    (We fish where we like).

A Poacher, I suppose! or was there a “double entendre”?

I’m told in the old days you could change your motto and your crest as
often as you liked, but not your coat of arms!

A succession of ancestors went and dwelt at Bodmin, in Cornwall--all
clergymen down to my grandfather, who was Rector of Wavendon, in Bucks,
where is a tablet to his brother, who was killed close to the Duke of
Wellington at Waterloo, and who ordered his watch to be sent to my
uncle’s relatives with the dent of the bullet that killed him, and that
watch I now have.

My uncle was telling this story at a _table d’hôte_ at Brussels a
great many years afterwards, and said he had been unable to identify
the spot, when an old white-haired gentleman at the table said he had
helped to bury him, and next day he took him to the place.

I remember a Dean glancing at me in a Sermon on the Apostles, when he
said the first four were all Fishers!

On the death of Sir Robert Fisher of Packington in 1739, a number of
family portraits were transferred apparently to the Rev. John Fisher
of Bodmin, born January 27th, 1708. The three principal portraits are
a previous Sir Robert Fisher, his son Sir Clement Fisher, who died
1683, and Jane Lane, his wife. Another portrait is a second Sir Clement
Fisher, son of the above and of Jane Lane. This Sir Clement Fisher died
1709, and was succeeded by his only brother, Sir Robert Fisher, who
died A.D. 1739, one year before his niece, Mary Fisher, wife of Lord
Aylesford. All these portraits were transmitted in direct inheritance
to Sir John Fisher. The four generations of Reverend John Fishers of
Bodmin, commencing with John Fisher born 1708, were none of them in a
position to incur the heavy expenses involved for their assumption of
the Baronetcy. They were descended from a brother of the Sir Robert
Fisher who lived before the year A.D. 1600.

I was born in 1841, the same year as King Edward VII. There was never
such a healthy couple as my father and mother. They never married
for money--they married for love. They married very young, and I was
their first child. All the physical advantages were in my favour, so
I consider I was absolutely right, when I was nine months old, in
refusing to be weaned.

    “She walks in beauty like the night
      Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
    And all that’s best of dark and bright
      Meets in her aspect and her eyes:
    Thus mellow’d to that tender light
      Which heaven to gaudy day denies.”

These lines were written by Lord Byron of my godmother, Lady Wilmot
Horton, of Catton Hall, Burton-on-Trent. She was still a very beautiful
old lady at 73 years of age when she died.

One of her great friends was Admiral Sir William Parker (the last of
Nelson’s Captains), and he, at her request, gave me his nomination for
entering the Navy. He had two to give away on becoming Port Admiral at
Plymouth. He gave the other to Lord Nelson’s own niece, and she also
filled in my name, so I was doubly nominated by the last of Nelson’s
Captains, and my first ship was the “Victory” and it was my last! In
the “Victory” log-book it is entered, “July 12th, 1854, joined Mr. John
Arbuthnot Fisher,” and it is also entered that Sir John Fisher hauled
down his flag on October 21st, 1904, on becoming First Sea Lord.

A friend of mine (a yellow Admiral) was taken prisoner in the old
French War when he was a Midshipman ten years old, and was locked
up in the fortress of Verdun. He so amused me in my young days by
telling me that he gave his parole not to escape! as if it mattered
what he did when he was only four foot nothing! And he did this, he
told me, in order to learn French; and when he had learned French,
to talk it fluently, he then cancelled his parole and was locked up
again and then he escaped; alone he did it by filing through the iron
bars of his prison window (the old historic method), and wended his
way to England. I consider this instance a striking testimony to the
inestimable benefit of sending little boys to sea when they are young!
What splendid Nelsonic qualities were developed!

But it was quite common in those days of my old yellow Admiral for
boys to go to sea even as young as seven years old. My present host’s
grandfather went to sea as a Midshipman at seven years old! Afterwards
he was Lord Nelson’s Signal Midshipman, his name was Hamilton, and his
grandson was Midshipman with me in two ships. He is now the 13th Duke
of Hamilton! It is interesting as a Nelsonic legend that the wife of
the 6th Duke of Hamilton (she was one of the beautiful Miss Gunnings;
she was the wife of two Dukes and the mother of four) peculiarly
befriended Emma, Lady Hamilton, and recognised her, as so few did then
(and, alas! still fewer now), as one of the noblest women who ever
lived--one mass of sympathy she was!

The stories of what boys went through then at sea were appalling. I
have a corroboration in lovely letters from a little Midshipman who
was in the great blockade of Brest by Admiral Cornwallis in 1802. This
little boy was afterwards killed just after Trafalgar. He describes
seeing the body of Nelson on board ship on its way to Portsmouth. This
little Midshipman was only eleven years old when he was killed! This is
how he describes the Midshipman’s food: “We live on beef which has been
ten or eleven years in a cask, and on biscuit which makes your throat
cold in eating it owing to the maggots, which are very cold when you
eat them! like calves-foot jelly or blomonge--being very fat indeed!”
(It makes one shudder!) He goes on again: “We drink water the colour of
the bark of a pear tree with plenty of little maggots and weevils in
it, and wine, which is exactly like bullock’s blood and sawdust mixed
together”; and he adds in his letter to his mother: “I hope I shall not
learn to swear, and by God’s assistance I hope I shall not!” He tried
to save the Captain of his Top (who had been at the “Weather earing”)
from falling from aloft. This is his description: “The hands were
hurried up to reef topsails, and my station is in the foretop. When
the men began to lay in from the yards (after reefing the topsails)
one of them laid hold of a slack rope, which gave way, and he fell out
of the top on deck and was dashed to pieces and very near carried
me out of the top along with him as I was attempting to lay hold of
him to save him!!!” Our little friend the Midshipman was eight years
old at this time! What a picture! this little boy trying to save the
sailor huge and hairy! His description to his mother of Cornwallis’s
Fleet is interesting: “We have on board Admiral Graves, who came in his
ten-oared barge, and as soon as he put his foot on shipboard the drums
and fifes began to play, and the Marines and all presented their arms.
We are all prepared for action, all our guns being loaded with double
shot. We have a fine sight, which is the Grand Channel Fleet, which
consists of 95 sail of the line, each from 120 down to 64 guns.”

That is the Midshipman of the olden day, and one often has misgivings
that the modern system of sending boys to sea much older is a bad
one, when such magnificent results were produced by the old method,
more especially as in the former days the Captain had a more paternal
charge of those little boys coming on board one by one, as compared
with the present crowd sent in batches of big hulking giants, some of
them. However, there is more to learn now than formerly, and possibly
it’s impossible (all the entrance examination I had to pass was to
write out the Lord’s Prayer, do a rule of three sum and drink a glass
of sherry!); but one would like to give it a trial of sending boys to
sea at nine years old. Our little hero tried to save the life of the
Captain of his Top when he was only eight years old! Still, the Osborne
system of Naval education has its great merits; but it has been a
grievous blow to it, departing from the original conception of entry
at eleven years of age.

However, the lines of the modern Midshipman are laid in pleasant
places; they get good food and a good night’s rest. Late as I came to
sea in 1854, I had to keep either the First or Middle Watch every night
and was always hungry! Devilled Pork rind was a luxury, and a Spanish
Onion with a Sardine in the Middle Watch was Paradise!

In the first ship I was in we not only carried our fresh water in
casks, but we had some rare old Ship’s Biscuit supplied in what were
known as “bread-bags.” These bread-bags were not preservative; they
were creative. A favourite amusement was to put a bit of this biscuit
on the table and see how soon all of it would walk away. In fact one
midshipman could gamble away his “tot” of rum with another midshipman
by pitting one bit of biscuit against another. Anyhow, whenever you
took a bit of biscuit to eat it you always tapped it edgeways on the
table to let the “grown-ups” get away.

The Water was nearly as bad as the Biscuit. It was turgid--it was
smelly--it was animally. I remember so well, in the Russian War
(1854–5), being sent with the Watering Party to the Island of Nargen
to get fresh water, as we were running short of it in this old Sailing
Line of Battleship I was in (there was no Distilling Apparatus in those
days). My youthful astonishment was how on earth the Lieutenant in
charge of the Watering Party discovered the Water. There wasn’t a lake
and there wasn’t a stream, but he went and dug a hole and there was
the water! However, it may be that he carried out the same delightful
plan as my delicious old Admiral in China. This Admiral’s survey of the
China Seas is one of the most celebrated on record. He told me himself
that this is how he did it. He used to anchor in some convenient
place every few miles right up the Coast of China. He had a Chinese
Interpreter on board. He sent this man to every Fishing Village and
offered a dollar for every rock and shoal. No rock or shoal has ever
been discovered since my beloved Admiral finished his survey. Perhaps
the Lieutenant of the Watering Party gave Roubles!

I must mention here an instance of the Simple Genius of the Chinese.
A sunken ship, that had defied all European efforts to raise her,
was bought by a Chinaman for a mere song. He went and hired all the
Chinamen from an adjacent Sponge Fishery and bought up several Bamboo
Plantations where the bamboos were growing like grass. The way they
catch sponges is this--The Chinaman has no diving dress--he holds his
nose--a leaden weight attached to his feet takes him down to where the
sponges are--he picks the sponges--evades the weight--and rises. They
pull up the weight with a bit of string afterwards. The Chinese genius
I speak of sent the men down with bamboos, and they stuck them into the
sunk ship, and soon “up she came”; and the Chinaman said:

    “Ship hab Bamboo--
    No hab Water!”

It’s a pity there’s no bamboo dodge for Sunk Reputations!

An uncle of mine had a snuff box made out of the Salt Beef, and it was
french-polished! That was his beef--and ours was nearly as hard.

There were many brutalities when I first entered the Navy--now
mercifully no more. For instance, the day I joined as a little boy I
saw eight men flogged--and I fainted at the sight.

Not long ago I was sitting at luncheon next to a distinguished author,
who told me I was “a very interesting person!” and wanted to know what
my idea of life was, I replied that what made a life was not its mature
years but the early portions when the seed was sown and the blossom
so often blasted by the frost of unrecognition. It was then that the
fruit of after years was pruned to something near the mark of success.
“Your great career was when you were young,” said a dear friend to me
the other day. I entered the Navy penniless, friendless and forlorn.
While my mess-mates were having jam, I had to go without. While their
stomachs were full, mine was often empty. I have always had to fight
like hell, and fighting like hell has made me what I am. Hunger and
thirst are the way to Heaven!

When I joined the Navy, in 1854, the last of Nelson’s Captains was the
Admiral at Plymouth. The chief object in those days seemed to be, not
to keep your vessel efficient for fighting, but to keep the deck as
white as snow and all the ropes taut. We Midshipmen were allowed only
a basin of water to wash in, and the basin was inside one’s sea-chest;
and if anyone spilt a drop of water on the deck he was made to
holy-stone it himself. And that reminds me, as I once told Lord Esher,
when I was a young First Lieutenant, the First Sea Lord told me that
_he_ never washed when he went to sea, and he didn’t see “why the Devil
the Midshipmen should want to wash now!” I remember one Captain named
Lethbridge who had a passion for spotless decks; and it used to put him
in a good temper for the whole day if he could discover a “swab-tail,”
or fragment of the swabs with which the deck was cleaned, left about.
One day he happened to catch sight of a Midshipman carefully arranging
a few swab-tails on deck in order to gratify “old Leather-breeches’”
lust for discovering them! And as for taut ropes, many of my readers
will remember the old story of the lady (on the North American station)
who congratulated the Captain of a “family” ship (officered by a set of
fools) because “the ropes hung in such beautiful festoons!”

There was a fiddler to every ship, and when the anchor was being
weighed, he used to sit on the capstan and play, so as to keep the
men in step and in good heart. And on Sundays, everyone being in full
dress, epaulettes and all, the fiddler walked round the decks playing
in front of the Captain. I must add this happened in a Brig commanded
by Captain Miller.

After the “Victory,” my next ship was the “Calcutta,” and I joined it
under circumstances which Mr. A. G. Gardiner has narrated thus:--

    “One day far back in the fifties of last century a sailing ship
    came round from Portsmouth into Plymouth Sound, where the fleet
    lay. Among the passengers was a little midshipman fresh from
    his apprenticeship in the ‘Victory.’ He scrambled aboard the
    Admiral’s ship, and with the assurance of thirteen marched up
    to a splendid figure in blue and gold, and said, handing him a
    letter: ‘Here, my man, give this to the Admiral.’ The man in
    blue and gold smiled, took the letter, and opened it. ‘Are you
    the Admiral?’ said the boy. ‘Yes, I’m the Admiral.’ He read
    the letter, and patting the boy on the head, said: ‘You must
    stay and have dinner with me.’ ‘I think,’ said the boy, ‘I
    should like to be getting on to my ship.’ He spoke as though
    the British Navy had fallen to his charge. The Admiral laughed,
    and took him down to dinner. That night the boy slept aboard
    the ‘Calcutta,’ a vessel of 84 guns, given to the British Navy
    by an Indian merchant at a cost of £84,000. It was the day of
    small things and of sailing-ships. The era of the ironclad and
    the ‘Dreadnought’ had not dawned.”

I think I must give the first place to one of the first of my Captains
who was the seventh son of the last Vice-Chancellor of England, Sir
Lancelot Shadwell. The Vice-Chancellor used to bathe in the Thames
with his seven sons every morning. My Shadwell was about the greatest
Saint on earth. The sailors called him, somewhat profanely, “Our
Heavenly Father.” He was once heard to say, “Damn,” and the whole ship
was upset. When, as Midshipmen, we punished one of our mess-mates for
abstracting his cheese, he was extremely angry with us, and asked us
all what right we had to interfere with his cheese. He always had the
Midshipmen to breakfast with him, and when we were seasick he gave us
champagne and ginger-bread nuts. As he went in mortal fear of his own
steward, who bossed him utterly, he would say: “I think the aroma has
rather gone out of this champagne. Give it to the young gentlemen.” The
steward would reply: “Now you know very well, Sir, the aroma _ain’t_
gone out of this ’ere champagne”; but all the same we got it. He always
slept in a hammock, and I remember he kept his socks in the head clews
ready to put on in case of a squall calling him suddenly on deck. I
learned from him nearly all that I know. He taught me how to predict
eclipses and occultations, and I suppose I took more lunar observations
than any Midshipman ever did before.

Shadwell’s appearance on going into a fight I must describe. We went up
a Chinese river to capture a pirate stronghold. Presently the pirates
opened fire from a banana plantation on the river bank. We nipped
ashore from the boats to the banana plantation. I remember I was armed
to the teeth, like a Greek brigand, all swords and pistols, and was
weighed down with my weapons. We took shelter in the banana plantation,
but our Captain stood on the river bank. I shall never forget it. He
was dressed in a pair of white trousers, yellow waistcoat and a blue
tail coat with brass buttons and a tall white hat with a gold stripe
up the side of it, and he was waving a white umbrella to encourage us
to come out of the bananas and go for the enemy. He had no weapon of
any sort. So (I think rather against our inclinations, as the gingall
bullets were flying about pretty thick) we all had to come out and go
for the Chinese.

Once the Chinese guns were firing at us, and as the shell whizzed over
the boat we all ducked. “Lay on your oars, my men,” said Shadwell;
and proceeded to explain very deliberately how ducking delayed the
progress of the boat--apparently unaware that his lecture had stopped
its progress altogether!

His sole desire for fame was to do good, and he requested for himself
when he died that he should be buried under an apple tree, so that
people might say: “God bless old Shadwell!” He never flogged a man in
his life. When my Captain was severely wounded, I being with him as his
Aide-de-Camp (we landed 1,100 strong, and 463 were killed or wounded),
he asked me when being sent home what he could do for me. I asked him
to give me a set of studs with his motto on them: “Loyal au mort,” and
I have worn them daily for over sixty years. When this conversation
took place, the Admiral (afterwards Sir James Hope, K.C.B.) came to
say good-bye to him, and he asked my Captain what he could do for him.
He turned his suffering body towards me and said to the Admiral: “Take
care of that boy.” And so he did.

Admiral Hope was a great man, very stern and stately, the sort of man
everybody was afraid of. His nickname was composed of the three ships
he had commanded: “Terrible ... Firebrand ... Majestic.” He turned to
me and said: “Go down in my boat”; and everyone in the Fleet saw this
Midshipman going into the Admiral’s boat. He took me with him to the
Flagship; and I got on very well with him because I wrote a very big
hand which he could read without spectacles.

He promoted me to Lieutenant at the earliest possible date, and sent
me on various services, which greatly helped me.

My first chance came when Admiral Hope sent me to command a vessel in
Chinese waters on special service. His motto was “Favouritism is the
secret of efficiency,” and though I was only nineteen he put me over
the heads of many older men because he believed that I should do what I
was told to do, and carry out the orders of the Admiral regardless of
consequences. And so I did, although I made all sorts of mistakes and
nearly lost the ship. When I came back everyone seemed to expect that I
should be tried by Court-Martial; but the Admiral only cared that I had
done what he wanted done; and then he gave me command of another vessel.

The Captain of the ship I came home in was another sea wonder, by name
Oliver Jones. He was Satanic; yet I equally liked him, for, like Satan,
he could disguise himself as an angel; and I believe I was the only
officer he did not put under arrest. For some reason I got on with him,
and he made me the Navigating Officer of the ship. He told me when I
first came on board that he thought he had committed every crime under
the sun except murder. I think he committed that crime while I was with
him. He was a most fascinating man. He had such a charm, he was most
accomplished, he was a splendid rider, a wonderful linguist, an expert
navigator and a thorough seaman. He had the best cook, and the best
wines ever afloat in the Navy, and was hospitable to an extreme. Almost
daily he had a lot of us to dinner, but after dinner came hell! We
dined with him in tail coat and epaulettes. After dinner he had sail
drill, or preparing the ship for battle, and persecution then did its
utmost.

Once, while I was serving with him, we were frozen in out of sight
of land in the Gulf of Pechili in the North of China. And there were
only Ship’s provisions, salt beef, salt pork, pea soup, flour, and
raisins. Oliver Jones was our Captain, or we wouldn’t have been frozen
in. The Authorities told him to get out of that Gulf and that’s why
he stayed in. I never knew a man who so hated Authority. I forget how
many degrees below zero the thermometer was, and it was only by an
unprecedented thaw that we ever got out. And with this intense cold he
would often begin at four o’clock in the morning to prepare for battle,
and hand up every shot in the ship on to the Upper Deck, then he’d
strike Lower Yards and Topmasts (which was rather a heavy business),
and finish up with holystoning the Decks, which operation he requested
all the Officers to honour with their presence. And when we went to Sea
we weren’t quite sure where we would go to (I remember hearing a Marine
Officer say that we’d got off the Chart altogether). Till that date I
had never known what a delicacy a seagull was. We used to get inside an
empty barrel on the ice to shoot them, and nothing was lost of them.
The Doctor skinned them to make waistcoats of the skins--the insides
were put on the ice to bait other seagulls, and a rare type of onion we
had (that made your eyes water when you got within half a mile of them)
made into stuffing got rid of the fishy taste.

[Illustration: KING EDWARD VII. AND THE CZAR, 1909.]

On the way home he landed me on a desert island to make a survey.
He was sparse in his praises; but he wrote of me: “As a sailor, an
officer, a Navigator and a gentleman, I cannot praise him too highly.”
Confronted with this uncommon expression of praise from Oliver Jones,
the examiners never asked me a question. They gave me on the spot a
first-class certificate.

This Captain Oliver Jones raised a regiment of cavalry for the Indian
Mutiny and was its Colonel, and Sir Hope Grant, the great Cavalry
General in the Indian Mutiny, said he had never met the equal of Oliver
Jones as a cavalry leader. He broke his neck out hunting.

When I was sent to the Hythe School of Musketry as a young Lieutenant,
I found myself in a small Squad of Officers, my right hand man was a
General and my left hand man a full Colonel. The Colonel spent his time
drawing pictures of the General. (The Colonel was really a wonderful
Artist.) The General was splendid. He was a magnificent-looking man
with a voice like a bull and his sole object was Mutiny! He hated
General Hay, who was in Command of the Hythe School of Musketry. He
hated him with a contemptuous disdain. In those days we commenced
firing at the target only a few hundred yards off. The General never
hit the target once! The Colonel made a beautiful picture of him
addressing the Parade and General Hay: “Gentlemen! my unalterable
conviction is that the bayonet is the true weapon of the British
Soldier!” The beauty of the situation was that the General had been
sent to Hythe to qualify as Inspector-General of Musketry. After
some weeks of careful drill (without firing a shot) we had to snap
caps (that was to get our nerves all right, I suppose!); the Sergeant
Instructor walked along the front of the Squad and counted ten copper
caps into each outstretched hand. At that critical moment General Hay
appeared on the Parade. This gave the General his chance! With his
bull-like voice he asked General Hay if it was believable after these
weeks of incessant application that we were going (each of us) to be
entrusted with ten copper caps! When we were examined _vivâ voce_ we
each had to stand up to answer a question (like the little boys at
a Sunday School). The General was asked to explain the lock of the
latest type of British Rifle. He got up and stated that as he was
neither Maskelyne and Cooke nor the Davenport Brothers (who were the
great conjurers of that time) he couldn’t do it. Certainly we had some
appalling questions. One that I had was, “What do you pour the water
into the barrel of the rifle with when you are cleaning it?” Both my
answers were wrong. I said, “With a tin pannikin or the palm of the
hand.” The right answer was “_with care_”! Another question in the
written examination was, “What occurred about _this_ time?” Only one
paragraph in the text-book had those words in it “About _this_ time
there occurred, etc.”! All the same I had a lovely time there; the
British Army was very kind to me and I loved it. The best shot in the
British Army at that date was a confirmed drunkard who trembled like
a leaf, but when he got his eye on the target he was a bit of marble
and “bull’s eyes” every time! So, as the Scripture says, never judge
by appearance. Keble, who wrote the “Christian Year,” was exceedingly
ugly, but when he spoke Heaven shone through; so I was told by one who
knew him.

It’s going rather backwards now to speak of the time when I was a
Midshipman of the “Jolly Boat” in 1854, in an old Sailing Line of
Battleship of eighty-four guns. I think I must have told of sailing
into Harbour every morning to get the Ship’s Company’s beef (gale or no
gale) from Spithead or Plymouth Sound or the Nore. We never went into
harbour in those days, and it was very unpleasant work. I always felt
there was a chance of being drowned. Once at the Nore in mid-winter all
our cables parted in a gale and we ran into the Harbour and anchored
with our hemp cable (our sole remaining joy); it seemed as big round as
my small body was then, and it lay coiled like a huge gigantic serpent
just before the Cockpit. Nelson must have looked at a similar hemp
cable as he died in that corner of the Cockpit which was close to it.
All Battleships were exactly alike. You could go ashore then for forty
years and come on board again quite up to date. On our Quarter Deck
were brass Cannonades that had fired at the French Fleet at Trafalgar.
No one but the Master knew about Navigation. I remember when the Master
was sick and the second Master was away and the Master’s Assistant had
only just entered the Navy, we didn’t go to Sea till the Master got out
of bed again. There was a wonderfully smart Commander in one of the
other Battleships who had the utmost contempt for Science; he used to
say that he didn’t believe in the new-fangled sighting of the guns,
“Your Tangent Sights and Disparts!” What he found to be practically the
best procedure was a cold veal pie and a bottle of rum to the first man
that hit the target. We have these same “dears” with us now, but they
are disguised in a clean white shirt and white kid gloves, but as for
believing in Engineers--“Sack the Lot”!

It is very curious that we have no men now of great conceptions who
stand out above their fellows in any profession, not even the Bishops,
which reminds me of a super-excellent story I’ve been told in a letter.
My correspondent met by appointment three Bishops for an expected
attack. Before they got to the business of the meeting, he said, “Could
their Lordships kindly tell him in the case of consecrated ground how
deep the consecration went, as he specially wanted to know this for
important business purposes.” They wrangled and he got off his “mauvais
quart d’heure.” My correspondent explained to me that his old Aunt (a
relation of Mr. Disraeli) said to him when he was young “Alfred, if you
are going to have a row with anyone--_always you begin_!”

I come to another episode of comparatively early years.

Yesterday I heard from a gentleman whom I had not seen for thirty-eight
years, and he reminded me of a visit to me when I was Captain of the
“Inflexible.” I was regarded by the Admiral Superintendent of the
Dockyard as the Incarnation of Revolution. (What upset him most was
I had asked for more water-closets and got them.) This particular
episode I’m going to relate was that I wanted the incandescent light.
Lord Kelvin had taken me to dine with the President of the Royal
Society, where for the first time his dining table was lighted with
six incandescent lamps, provided by his friend Mr. Swan of Newcastle,
the Inventor in this Country of the Incandescent light, as Mr. Edison
was in America (it was precisely like the discovery of the Planet
Neptune when Adams and Leverrier ran neck and neck in England and
France). After this dinner I wrote to Mr. Swan to get these lamps for
the “Inflexible,” and he sent down the friend who wrote me the letter
I received yesterday (Mr. Henry Edmunds) and we had an exhibition to
convert this old fossil of an Admiral Superintendent.

Here I’ll put in Mr. Henry Edmunds’s own words:--

    At last we got our lamps to glow satisfactorily; and at that
    moment the Admiral was announced. Captain Fisher had warned me
    that I must be careful how I answered any questions, for the
    Admiral was of the stern old school, and prejudiced against
    all new-fangled notions. The Admiral appeared resplendent in
    gold lace, and accompanied by such a bevy of ladies that I was
    strongly reminded of the character in “H.M.S. Pinafore” “with
    his sisters, and his cousins, and his aunts.” The Admiral
    immediately asked if I had seen the “Inflexible.” I replied
    that I had. “Have you seen the powder magazine?” “Yes! I have
    been in it.” “What would happen to one of these little glass
    bubbles in the event of a broadside?” I did not think it would
    affect them. “How do you know? You’ve never been in a ship
    during a broadside!” I saw Captain Fisher’s eye fixed upon me;
    and a sailor was dispatched for some gun-cotton. Evidently
    everything had been ready prepared, for he quickly returned
    with a small tea tray about two feet long, upon which was a
    layer of gun-cotton, powdered over with black gun-powder. The
    Admiral asked if I was prepared to break one of the lamps over
    the tray. I replied that I could do so quite safely, for the
    glowing lamp would be cooled down by the time it fell amongst
    the gun-cotton. I took a cold chisel, smashed a lamp, and let
    it fall. The Company saw the light extinguished, and a few
    pieces of glass fall on the tray. There was no flash, and
    the gun-powder and gun-cotton remained as before. There was
    a short pause, while the Admiral gazed on the tray. Then he
    turned, and said to Lord Fisher, “We’ll have this light on the
    ‘Inflexible.’”

    And that was the introduction of the incandescent light into
    the British Navy.

Talking about water-closets, I remember so well long ago that one of
the joys on board a Man-of-War on Christmas Day was having what was
called a “Free Tank,” that is to say, you could go and get as much
fresh water as ever you liked, all other days you were restricted, so
much for drinking and so much for washing. The other Christmas Joy was
“Both sides of the ‘Head’ open”! What that meant was that right in the
Bows or Head of the Ship were situated all the Bluejackets’ closets,
and on Christmas Day all could be used! “all were free.” Usually only
half were allowed to be open at a time. It was a quaint custom, and I
always thought outrageous. “Nous avons changé tout cela.”

When I was out in the West Indies a French Frigate came into the
Harbour with Yellow Fever on board. My Admiral asked the Captain of
the English Man-of-War that happened to be there what kindness he had
shown the French Frigate on arrival? He said he had sent them the keys
of the Cemetery. This Captain always took his own champagne with him
and put it under his chair. I took a passage with him once in his Ship,
he had a Chart hanging up in his cabin like one of those recording
barometers, which showed exactly how his wine was getting on. When he
came to call on the Admiral at his house on shore, he always brought a
small bundle with him, and after his Official visit he’d go behind a
bush in the garden and change into plain clothes! All the same, this is
the stuff that heroes are made of. Heroes are always quaint.




CHAPTER II.

FURTHER MEMORIES OF KING EDWARD AND OTHERS


King Edward paid a visit to Admiralty House, Portsmouth, 19th February
to 22nd February, 1904, while I was Commander-in-Chief there; and after
he had left I received the following letter from Lord Knollys:--

                                        BUCKINGHAM PALACE,
                                              _22nd February, 1904._

    MY DEAR ADMIRAL,

    I am desired by the King to write and thank you again for your
    hospitality.

    His Majesty also desires me to express his great appreciation
    of all of the arrangements, which were excellent, and they
    reflect the greatest credit both on you and on those who worked
    under your orders.

    I am very glad the visit was such a great success and went off
    so well. The King was evidently extremely pleased with and
    interested in everything.

                                                Yours sincerely,
                                                            KNOLLYS.

I can say that I never more enjoyed such a visit. The only thing was
that I wasn’t Master in my own house, the King arranged who should
come to dinner and himself arranged how everyone should sit at table;
I never had a look in. Not only this, but he also had the Cook up in
the morning. She was absolutely the best cook I’ve ever known. She was
cheap at £100 a year. She was a remarkably lovely young woman. She died
suddenly walking across a hay field. The King gave her some decoration,
I can’t remember what it was. Some little time after the King had
left--one night I said to the butler at dinner, “This soup was never
made by Mrs. Baker; is she ill?” The butler replied, “No, Sir John,
Mrs. Baker isn’t ill, she has been invited by His Majesty the King to
stay at Buckingham Palace.” And that was the first I had heard of it.
Mrs. Baker had two magnificent kitchenmaids of her own choosing and
she thought she wouldn’t be missed. I had an interview with Mrs. Baker
on her return from her Royal Visit, and she told me that the King had
said to her one morning before he left Admiralty House, Portsmouth,
that he thought she would enjoy seeing how a Great State Dinner was
managed, and told her he would ask her to stay at Buckingham Palace or
Windsor Castle to see one! Which is only one more exemplification of
what I said of King Edward in my first book, that he had an astounding
aptitude of appealing to the hearts of both High and Low.

My friends tell me I have done wrong in omitting countless other little
episodes of his delightful nature.

“One touch of nature makes the whole world kin!”

This is a sweet little episode that occurred at Sandringham. The King
was there alone and Lord Redesdale and myself were his only guests.
The King was very fond of Redesdale, and rightly so. He was a most
delightful man. He and I were sitting in the garden near dinner time,
the King came up and said it was time to dress and he went up in the
lift, leaving Redesdale in the garden. Redesdale had a letter to write
and rushed up to his bedroom to write the letter behind a screen
there was between him and the door; the door opened and in came the
King, thinking he had left Redesdale in the garden, and went to the
wash-hand-stand and felt the hot water-can to see if the water was hot
and went out again. Perhaps his water had been cold, but anyhow he came
to see if his guest’s was all right.

On another occasion I went down to Sandringham with a great party, I
think it was for one of Blessed Queen Alexandra’s birthdays (I hope
Her Majesty will forgive me for telling a lovely story presently about
herself). As I was zero in this grand party, I slunk off to my room to
write an important letter; then I took my coat off, got out my keys,
unlocked my portmanteau and began unpacking. I had a boot in each hand;
I heard somebody fumbling with the door handle and thinking it was the
Footman whom Hawkins had allocated to me, I said “Come in, don’t go
humbugging with that door handle!” and in walked King Edward, with a
cigar about a yard long in his mouth. He said (I with a boot in each
hand!) “What on earth are you doing?” “Unpacking, Sir.” “Where’s your
servant?” “Haven’t got one, Sir.” “Where is he?” “Never had one, Sir;
couldn’t afford it.” “Put those boots down; sit in that arm chair.”
And he went and sat in the other on the other side of the fire. I
thought to myself, “This is a rum state of affairs! Here’s the King of
England sitting in my bedroom on one side of the fire and I’m in my
shirt sleeves sitting in an armchair on the other side!”

“Well,” His Majesty said, “why didn’t you come and say, ‘How do you
do’ when you arrived?” I said, “I had a letter to write, and with so
many great people you were receiving I thought I had better come to
my room.” Then he went on with a long conversation, until it was only
about a quarter of an hour from dinner time, and I hadn’t unpacked! So
I said to the King, “Sir, you’ll be angry if I’m late for dinner, and
no doubt your Majesty has two or three gentlemen to dress you, but I
have no one.” And he gave me a sweet smile and went off.

All the same, he could be extremely unpleasant; and one night I had to
send a telegram for a special messenger to bring down some confounded
Ribbon and Stars, which His Majesty expected me to wear. I’d forgotten
the beastly things (I’m exactly like a Christmas Tree when I’m dressed
up). One night when I got the King’s Nurse to dress me up, she put the
Ribbon of something over the wrong shoulder, and the King harangued
me as if I’d robbed a church. I didn’t like to say it was his Nurse’s
fault. Some of these Ribbons you put over one shoulder and some of them
you have to put over the other; it’s awfully puzzling. But the King was
an Angel all the same, only he wasn’t always one. Personally I don’t
like perfect angels, one doesn’t feel quite comfortable with them. One
of Cecil Rhodes’s secretaries wrote his Life, and left out all his
defects; it was a most unreal picture. The Good stands out all the more
strikingly if there is a deep shadow. I think it’s called the Rembrandt
Effect. Besides, it’s unnatural for a man not to have a Shadow, and
the thought just occurs to me how beautiful it is--“The Shadow of
Death”! There couldn’t be the Shadow unless there was a bright light!
The Bright Light is Immortality! Which reminds me that yesterday I
read Dean Inge’s address at the Church Congress the day before on
Immortality. If I had anything to do with it, I’d make him Archbishop
of Canterbury. I don’t know him, but I go to hear him preach whenever I
can.

The Story about Queen Alexandra is this. My beloved friend Soveral,
one of King Edward’s treasured friends, asked me to lunch on Queen
Alexandra’s sixtieth birthday. After lunch all the people said
something nice to Queen Alexandra, and it came to my turn, I said
to Her Majesty, “Have you seen that halfpenny newspaper about your
Majesty’s birthday?” She said she hadn’t, what was it? I said these
were the words:--

    “The Queen is sixty to-day!
    May she live till she looks it!”

Her Majesty said “Get me a copy of it!” (Such a thing didn’t exist!)
About three weeks afterwards (Her Majesty has probably forgotten all
about it now, but she hadn’t then) she said, “Where’s that halfpenny
newspaper?” I was staggered for a moment, but recovered myself and
said “Sold out, Ma’am; couldn’t get a copy!” (I think my second lie
was better than my first!) But the lovely part of the story yet
remains. A year afterwards she sent me a lovely postcard which I much
treasure now. It was a picture of a little girl bowling a hoop, and Her
Majesty’s own head stuck on, and underneath she had written:--

                   “May she live till she looks it!”

I treasure the remembrances of all her kindnesses to me as well as
that of her dear Sister, the Dowager Empress of Russia. The trees they
both planted at Kilverstone are both flourishing; but strange to say
the tree King Edward planted began to fade away and died in May, 1910,
when he died--though it had flourished luxuriantly up till then. Its
roots remain untouched--and a large mass of “Forget-me-nots” flourishes
gloriously over them.

       *       *       *       *       *

For very many consecutive years after 1886 I went to Marienbad in
Bohemia (eight hundred miles from London and two thousand feet above
the sea and one mass of delicious pine woods) to take the waters there.
It’s an ideal spot. The whole place is owned by a Colony of Monks,
settled in a Monastery (close by) called Tepl, who very wisely have
resisted all efforts to cut down the pine woods so as to put up more
buildings.

I had a most serious illness after the Bombardment of Alexandria
due to bad living, bad water, and great anxiety. The Admiral (Lord
Alcester) had entrusted me (although I was one of the junior Captains
in the Fleet) with the Command on shore after the Bombardment. Arabi
Pasha, in command of the Rebel Egyptian Army, was entrenched only a few
miles off, and I had but a few hundreds to garrison Alexandria. For the
first time in modern history we organised an Armoured Train. Nowadays
they are as common as Aeroplanes. Then it excited as much emotion
as the Tanks did. There was a very learned essay in the _Pall Mall
Gazette_.

I was invalided home and, as I relate in my “Memories,” received
unprecedented kindness from Queen Victoria (who had me to stay at
Osborne) and from Lord Northbrook (First Lord of the Admiralty), who
gave me the best appointment in the Navy. I always have felt great
gratitude also to his Private Secretary at that time (Admiral Sir Lewis
Beaumont). For three years I had recurrence of Malarial Fever, and
tried many watering places and many remedies all in vain. I went to
Marienbad and was absolutely cured in three weeks, and never relapsed
till two years ago, when I was ill again and no one has ever discovered
what was the matter with me! Thanks be to God--I believe I am now as
well as I ever was in all my whole life, and I can still waltz with joy
and enjoy champagne when I can get it (friends, kindly note!).

At Marienbad I met some very celebrated men, and the place being so
small I became great friends with them. If you are restricted to a
Promenade only a few hundred yards long for two hours morning and
evening, while you are drinking your water, you can’t help knowing each
other quite well. How I wish I could remember all the splendid stories
those men told me!

Campbell-Bannerman, Russell (afterwards Chief Justice), Hawkins
(afterwards Lord Brampton), the first Lord Burnham, Labouchere (of
_Truth_), Yates (of the _World_), Lord Shand (a Scottish Judge),
General Gallifet (famous in the Franco-German War), Rumbold (Ambassador
at Vienna), those were some of the original members. Also there
were two Bevans (both delightful)--to distinguish them apart, they
called the “Barclay Perkins” Bevan “poor” Bevan, as he was supposed
to have only two millions sterling, while the other one was supposed
to have half a dozen! (That was the story.) I almost think I knew
Campbell-Bannerman the best. He was very delightful to talk to. I have
no Politics. But in after years I did so admire his giving Freedom
to the Boers. Had he lived, he would have done the same to Ireland
without any doubt whatever. Fancy now 60,000 British soldiers quelling
veiled Insurrection and a Military Dictator as Lord Lieutenant and
Ireland never so prosperous! I have never been more moved than in
listening to John Redmond’s brother, just back from the War in his
Soldier’s uniform, making the most eloquent and touching appeal for
the Freedom of Ireland! _It came to nothing._ I expect Lord Loreburn
(who was Campbell-Bannerman’s bosom friend) will agree with me that had
Campbell-Bannerman only known what a literally overwhelming majority he
was going to obtain at the forthcoming Election, he would have formed
a very different Government from what he did, and I don’t believe we
should have had the War. King Edward liked him very much. They had a
bond in their love of all things French. I don’t believe any Prime
Minister was ever so loved by his followers as was Campbell-Bannerman.

Sir Charles Russell, afterwards Chief Justice, was equally delightful.
We were so amused one day (when he first came to Marienbad) by the Head
Waiter whispering to us that he was a cardsharper! The Head Waiter told
us he had seen him take a pack of cards out of his pocket, look at
them carefully, and then put them back! Which reminds me of a lovely
incident in my own career. I had asked the Roman Catholic Archbishop to
dinner; he was a great Saint--we played cards after dinner. We sat down
to play--(one of my guests was a wonderful conjurer). “Hullo!” I said,
“Where are the cards gone to?” The conjurer said, “It doesn’t matter:
the Archbishop will let us have the pack of cards he always carries
about in his pocket”! The Holy Man furtively put his hand in his pocket
(thinking my friend was only joking!) and dash it! there they were! I
never saw such a look in a man’s face! (He thought Satan was crawling
about somewhere.)

Lord Burnham was ever my great Friend, he was also a splendid man.
I should like to publish his letters. I have spoken of Labouchere
elsewhere. As Yates, of the _World_, Labouchere, and Lord Burnham
(those three) walked up and down the Promenade together (Lord
Burnham being stout), Russell called them “The World, the Flesh, and
the Devil.” I don’t know if it was original wit, but it was to me.

[Illustration: TWO PHOTOGRAPHS OF KING EDWARD VII. AND SIR JOHN FISHER
ON BOARD H.M.S. “DREADNOUGHT” ON HER FIRST CRUISE.]

Old Gallifet also was splendid company; he had a silver plate over part
of his stomach and wounds all over him. I heard weird stories of how he
shot down the Communists.

Sir Henry Hawkins I dined with at some Legal Assemblage, and as we
walked up the Hall arm in arm all the Law Students struck up a lovely
song I’d never heard before: “Mrs. ’enry ’awkins,” which he greatly
enjoyed. On one occasion he told me that when he was still a Barrister,
he came late into Court and asked what was the name of the Barrister
associated with him in the Case? The Usher or someone told him it was
Mr. Swan and he had just gone out of the Court. (I suppose he ought to
have waited for Sir Henry.) Anyhow Sir Henry observed that he didn’t
like him “taking liberties with his Leda.” I expect the Usher, not
being up in Lemprière’s Dictionary, didn’t see the joke!

Dear Shand, who was very small of stature, was known as the “Epitome
of all that was good in Man.” He reeked with good stories and never
told them twice. Queen Victoria fell in love with him at first sight
(notwithstanding that she preferred big men) and had him made a Lord.
She asked after his wife as “Lady Shand”; and, being a Scottish Law
Lord, he replied that “Mrs. Shand was quite well.” There are all sorts
of ways of becoming a Lord.

Rumbold knocked the man down who asked him for his ticket! He wasn’t
going to have an Ambassador treated like that (as if he had travelled
without a ticket!)

As the Czechs hate the Germans, I look forward to going back to my
beloved Marienbad once more every year. The celebrated Queen of Bohemia
was the daughter of an English King; her name was Elizabeth. The
English Ambassador to the Doge of Venice, Sir Henry Wootton, wrote
some imperishable lines in her praise and accordingly I worshipped at
Wootton’s grave in Venice. The lines in his Poem that I love are:--

    “You Common People of the Skies,
    What are You, when the Moon shall rise?”

In dictating the Chapter on “Some Personalities,” that appears in
my “Memories,” I certainly should not have overlooked my very good
friend Masterton-Smith (Sir J. E. Masterton-Smith, K.C.B.). I can only
say here (as he knows quite well) that never was he more appreciated
by anyone in his life than by me. Numberless times he was simply
invaluable, and had his advice been always taken, events would have
been so different in May 1915!

I have related in “Memories” how malignancy went to the extent not
only of declaring that I had sold my country to the Germans (so
beautifully denied by Sir Julian Corbett), but also that I had formed
“Syndicates” and “Rings” for my own financial advantage, using my
official knowledge and power to further my nefarious schemes for making
myself quickly rich! I have denied this by the Income Tax Returns--and
I have also explained I am still poor--very poor--because one-third of
my pension goes in income tax and the remaining two-thirds is really
only one-third because of depreciation of the pound sterling and
appreciation of food prices!

But let that pass. However, I’ve been told I ought to mention I had
another very brilliant opportunity of becoming a millionaire in A.D.
1910, but declined. And also it has been requested of me to state the
fact that never in all my life have I belonged to any company of any
sort beyond possessing shares, or had any place of profit outside the
Navy. That is sufficiently definite, I think, to d----n my enemies and
satisfy my friends.

My finances have always been at a low ebb (even when a
Commander-in-Chief), as I went on the principle of “whatever you do,
do it with all your might,” and there is nothing less conducive to
“the fighting efficiency of a Fleet and its instant readiness for
war” than a Stingy Admiral! The applications for subscriptions which
were rained upon me I countered with this inestimable memorandum in
reply, invented by my sympathetic Secretary:--“The Admiral deeply
regrets being unable to comply with your request, and he deplores the
reason--but his Expenditure is in excess of his Receipts.” I always
got sympathy in return, more especially as the Local Applicants were
largely responsible for the excess of expenditure.

At an early period of my career I certainly did manage on very little,
and it is wonderful what a lot you can get for your money if you think
it over. I got breakfast for tenpence, lunch for a shilling and dinner
for eighteen pence and barley water for nothing and a bed for three
and sixpence (but my bedroom had not a Southern aspect). The man I
hired a bedroom from was like a Father to me, and I have never had such
a polish on my shoes. (I remember saying to a German Boots, pointing
to my badly-cleaned shoes, “Spiegel!”--looking-glass; he took away
the shoes and brought them back shining like a dollar. Hardly anyone
will see the joke!) But what I am most proud of is that, financial
necessity once forcing me to go to Marienbad quite alone, I did a three
weeks’ cure there, including the railway fare and every expense, for
twenty-five pounds. I don’t believe any Economist has ever beaten this.
I preserve to this day the details of every day’s expenditure, which
I kept in a little pocket-book, and read it all over only a couple of
days ago, without any wish for past days.

I recall with delight first meeting my beloved old friend, Sir Henry
Lucy; he had with him Sir F. C. Gould, who never did a better service
to his country than when he portrayed me as an able seaman asking the
Conscriptionists (in the person of Lord Roberts) whether there was no
British Navy. The cartoon was reproduced in my “Memories” (p. 48). In
my speech at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet in 1907 (see Chapter VI of this
volume) I had spoken of Sir Henry Lucy as “gulled by some Midshipman
Easy of the Channel Fleet” (Sir Henry had been for a cruise in the
Fleet), who stuffed him up that the German Army embarking in the German
Fleet was going to invade England! And in the flippant manner that
seems so to annoy people, I observed that Sir Henry might as well
talk of embarking St. Paul’s Cathedral on board a penny steamer as of
embarking the German Army in the German Fleet! He and Gould came up to
me at a _séance_ on board the “Dreadnought,” and had a cup of tea as if
I had been a lamb!

On the occasion of that same speech, a Bishop looked very sternly at
me, because in my speech, to show how if you keep on talking about
war and always looking at it and thinking of it you bring it on, I
instanced Eve, who kept on looking at the apple and at last she plucked
it; and in the innocence of my heart I observed that had she not done
so we should not have been now bothered with clothes. When I said this
in my speech I was following the advice of one of the Sheriffs of the
City of London, sitting next me at dinner, who told me to fix my eyes,
while I was speaking, on the corner of the Ladies’ Gallery, as then
everyone in the Guildhall could hear what I said. And such a lovely
girl was in that corner, I never took my eyes off her, all the time,
and that brought Eve into my mind!




CHAPTER III

THE BIBLE, AND OTHER REFLECTIONS


I have just been listening to another very eloquent sermon from Dr.
Hugh Black, whom I mention elsewhere in this book (see Chapter V).
Nearly all these Presbyterians are eloquent, because they don’t write
their sermons.

The one slip our eloquent friend made in his sermon was in saying that
the _A.D._ 1611 edition of the Bible (the Authorised Version) was a
better version of the Bible than the Great Bible of _A.D._ 1539, which
according to the front page is stated to be as follows:--

    “The byble in English that is to say the content of all
    the Holy Scripture both of the old and new testament truly
    translated after the verity of the Hebrew and Greek texts by
    the diligent study of diverse excellent learned men expert in
    the aforesaid tongues.

    “Printed by Richard Grafton and Edward Whitchurch. Cum
    privilegio ad imprimendum solum.

                                 1539.”

It is true, as the preacher said, that the 1611 edition, the Authorised
Version, is more the literal translation of the two, but those
“diverse excellent learned men” translated according to the spirit and
not the letter of the original; and our dear brother (the preacher)
this morning in his address had to acknowledge that in the text he
had chosen from the 27th Psalm and the last verse thereof, the pith
and marrow which he rightly seized on--being the words “Wait on the
Lord”--were more beautifully rendered in the great Bible from which
(the Lord be thanked!) the English Prayer Book takes its Psalms, and
which renders the original Hebrew not in the literal words, “Wait on
the Lord,” but “_Tarry thou the Lord’s leisure_,” and goes on also
in far better words than the Authorised Version with the rest of the
verse: “Be strong and He shall comfort thine heart.”

When we remonstrated with the Rev. Hugh Black after his sermon, he
again gainsaid, and increased his heinousness by telling us that the
word “Comfort,” which doesn’t appear in the 1611 version, was in its
ancient signification a synonym for “Fortitude”; and the delightful
outcome of it is that that is really the one and only proper prayer--to
ask for Fortitude or _Endurance_. You have no right to pray for rain
for your turnips, when it will ruin somebody else’s wheat. You have no
right to ask the Almighty--in fact, He can’t do it--to make two and two
into five. The only prayer to pray is for Endurance, or Fortitude. The
most saintly man I know, daily ended his prayers with the words of that
wonderful hymn:

    “Renew my will from day to day,
    Blend it with thine, and take away
    All that now makes it hard to say,
    Thy will be done.”

It must not be assumed that I am a Saint in any way in making these
remarks, but only a finger-post pointing the way. The finger-post
doesn’t go to Heaven itself, yet it shows the way. All I want to
do is to stick up for those holy men who were not hide-bound with
a dictionary, and gave us the spirit of the Holy Word and not the
Dictionary meaning.

Here I feel constrained to mention a far more beautiful illustration of
the value of those pious men of old.

In Brother Black’s 1611 version, the most famous of the Saviour’s
words: “Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden and I
will give you rest,” is, in the 1539 version, “I will _refresh_ you!”
There is no _rest_ this side of Heaven. Job (iii, 17) explains Heaven
as “Where the wicked cease from troubling and where the weary be at
rest.” The fact is--the central point is reached by the Saviour when He
exemplifies the Day of Perfection by saying: “In that day ye shall ask
me nothing.”

I have been told by a great scientist that for the tide to move a
pebble on the beach a millionth of an inch further would necessitate an
alteration in the whole Creation. And then we go and pray for rain, or
to beat our enemies!

Again, I say--The only thing to pray for is _Endurance_.

Some people in sore straits try to strike bargains with God, if only He
will keep them safe or relieve them in the present necessity. It’s a
good story of the soldier who, with all the shells exploding round him
was heard to pray: “O Lord, if You’ll only get me out of this d--d mess
I will be good, I will be good!”

I am reminded of what I call the “Pith and Marrow” which the pious
men put at the head of every chapter of the Bible, and which, alas!
has been expunged in the literary exactitudes of the Revised Version.
Regard Chapter xxvi, for instance, of Proverbs--how it is all summed up
by those “diverse excellent learned men.” They wrote at the top of the
chapter “Observations about Fools.” Matthew xxii: the Saviour “_Poseth_
the Pharisees.” Isaiah xxi: “The _set_ time.” Isaiah xxvii (so true
and pithy of the Chapter!): “Chastisements differ from Judgments”; and
in Mark xv: “The Clamour of the Common People”--descriptive of what’s
in the chapter. All these headings, in my opinion, as regards those
ancient translators, are for them a “Crown of Glory and a Diadem of
Beauty”; and I have a feeling that, when they finished their wondrous
studies, it was with them as Solomon said, “The desire accomplished is
sweet to the Soul.”


DR. GINSBURG

                                                 _March 27th, 1918._

    DEAR FRIEND,

    When I was at Bath I read in the local paper a beautiful letter
    aptly alluding to the Mount Fiesole of Bath and quoting what
    has been termed that mysterious verse of David’s:

             “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills----.”

    Well! the other day a great friend of that wonderful Hebrew
    scholar, Dr. Ginsburg--he died long since at Capri--told
    me that Ginsburg had said to him that all the Revisers and
    Translators had missed a peculiar Hebraism which quite alters
    the signification of this opening verse of the 121st Psalm: It
    should read:

    “_Shall_ I lift up mine eyes to those hills? DOTH my help come
    from thence?”

And this is the explanation:

Those hills alluded to were the hills in which were the Groves planted
in honour of the idols towards which Israel had strayed. So in the
second verse the inspired tongue says:

    “No! My help cometh from the Lord! He who hath made Heaven and
    Earth! (not these idols).”

I have had an admiration for Ginsburg ever since he shut up the two
Atheists in the Athenæum Club, Huxley and Herbert Spencer, who were
reviling Holy Writ in Ginsburg’s presence and flouting him. So he asked
the two of them to produce anything anywhere in literature comparable
to the 23rd Psalm as translated by Wyclif, Tyndale, and Coverdale. He
gave them a week to examine, and at the end of it they confessed that
they could not.

One of them (I could not find out which it was) wrote:

“I won’t argue about nor admit the Inspiration claimed, but I say
this--that those saintly men whom Cromwell formed as the company to
produce the Great Bible of 1539 _were inspired_, for never has the
spirit of the original Hebrew been more beautifully transformed from
the original harshness into such spiritual wealth.”

Those are not the exact words, I have not got them by me, but that was
the sense.

The English language in A.D. 1539 was at its very maximum. Hence the
beauty of the Psalms which come from the Great Bible as produced by
that holy company of pious men, who one writer says: “Did not wish
their names to be ever known.” I send you the title page.

                                                    Yours, etc.,
                                                        (Signed) FISHER.
                                                            27/3/18.

I enclosed with this letter the front page of the first edition of the
Great Bible, A.D. 1539, often known as Cranmer’s Bible, but Archbishop
Cranmer had nothing whatever to do with it except writing a preface to
it; it was solely due to Cromwell, Secretary of State to Henry VIII.,
who cut off Cromwell’s head in July, 1540. Cranmer wrote a preface for
the edition after April, 1540. Cranmer was burnt at the stake in Mary’s
reign. Tyndale was strangled and burnt, Coverdale, Bishop of Exeter,
died of hunger. Coverdale headed the company that produced the Great
Bible, and Tyndale’s translation was taken as the basis. (So those who
had to do with the Bible had a rough time of it!)

John Wyclif, in A.D. 1380, began the translation of the Bible into
English. This was before the age of printing, so it was in manuscript.
Before he died, in A.D. 1384, he had the joy of seeing the Bible in the
hands of his countrymen in their own tongue.

Wyclif’s translation was quaint and homely, and so idiomatic as to
have become out of date when, more than one hundred years afterwards,
John Tyndale, walking over the fields in Wiltshire, determined so
to translate the Bible into English “that a boy that driveth the
plough should know more of the Scriptures than the Pope,” and Tyndale
gloriously succeeded! But for doing so, the Papists, under orders from
the Pope of Rome, half strangled him and then burnt him at the stake.
Like St. Paul, he was shipwrecked! (Just as he had finished the Book of
Jonah, which is curious, but there was no whale handy, and so he was
cast ashore in Holland, nearly dead!)

Our present Bible, of A.D. 1611, is almost word for word the Bible
of Tyndale, of round A.D. 1530, but in A.D. 1534, Miles Coverdale,
Bishop of Exeter, was authorised by Archbishop Cranmer and Thomas
Cromwell (who was Secretary of State to Henry VIII.) to publish his
fresh translation, and he certainly beautified in many places Tyndale’s
original!

In 1539, “Diverse excellent learned men expert in the ‘foresaid
tongues’” (Hebrew and Greek), under Cromwell’s orders made a true
translation of the whole Bible, which was issued in 1539–40 in four
editions, and remained supreme till A.D. 1568, when the Bishops tried
to improve it, and made a heavenly mess of it! And then the present
Authorised Version, issued in A.D. 1611, became the Bible of the Land,
and still holds its own against the recent pedantic Revised Version of
A.D. 1884. No one likes it. It is literal, but it is not spiritual!

In the opinion of Great and Holy men, Cranmer’s Bible (as it is
called), or “the Great Bible”--the Bible of 1539 to 1568--holds the
field for beauty of its English and its emotional rendering of the Holy
Spirit!

Alas! we don’t know their names; we only know of them as “Diverse
excellent learned men!” It is said they did not wish to go down to Fame!

“It is the greatest achievement in letters! The Beauty of the
translation of these unknown men excels (far excels) the real and the
so-called originals! All nations and tongues of Christendom have come
to admit reluctantly that no other version of the Book in the English
or any other tongue offers so noble a setting for the Divine Message.
Read the Prayer Book Psalms! They are from this noble Version--English
at its zenith! The English of the Great Bible is even more stately,
sublime, and pure than the English of Shakespeare and Elizabeth.”


ACTION

“Ye men of Galilee! Why stand ye gazing up into Heaven?” (Acts, Chapter
i., verse 11.)

The moral of this one great central episode of the whole Christian
faith (which, if a man don’t believe with his utmost heart he is as a
beast that perisheth, so Saint Paul teaches in I. Corinthians, Chapter
xv.), the moral of it is that however intense at any moment of our
lives may be the immediate tension that is straining our mental fibre
to the limit, yet we are to “get on!” and not stand stock still “gazing
up into Heaven!” Inaction must be no part of our life, and we must
“get on” with our journey as the Apostles did--“to our own City of
Jerusalem!”

It is curious that Thursday (Ascension Day) was not made the Christian
Sabbath. No scientific agnostic could possibly explain the Ascension
by any such theories as those that try to get over the fact of the
Resurrection by cataleptic happenings or an inconceivable trance! The
agnostic can’t explain away that He was seen by the Apostles to be
carried up into Heaven when in the act of lifting up His hands upon
them to bless them “and a cloud received Him out of their sight!”

_Vide_ the Collect for the Sunday after Ascension Day!


RESENTMENT

The prophet Zechariah says in Chapter xiv., verse 7:

    “At evening time
    It shall be light!”

And I conclude that in the last stage of life, as pointed out so very
decisively by Dr. Weir Mitchell (that great American), “the brain
becomes its best,” and so we rearrange our hearts and minds to the
great advantage of our own Heaven and the avoidance of Hell to others!
“Resentment” I find to fade away, and it merges into the feeling of
Commiseration! (“Poor idiots!” one says instead of “D--n ’em!”) But
I can’t arrive as yet at St. Paul, who deliberately writes that he’s
quite ready to go to Hell so as to let his enemy go to Heaven! You’ve
got really to be a real Christian to say that! I’ve not the least
doubt, however, that John Wesley, Bishop Jeremy Taylor and Robertson
of Brighton felt it surely! Isn’t it odd that those three great saints
(fit to be numbered “with these three men, Noah, Daniel and Job,”
Ezekiel, Chapter xiv., verse 14) each of them should have a “nagging”
wife!

Their Home was Hell!

And I’ve searched in vain for any one of the three saying a word to the
detriment of the other sex! They might all have been Suffragettes! (St.
Paul does indeed say that he preferred being single! But Peter was
married!)

But this “Resentment” section hinges entirely on “Charity” as defined
and exemplified by Mr. Robertson, of Brighton, in one of the best of
his wonderful Trinity Chapel Sermons.


DEAN INGE

I heard the Dean of St. Paul’s (Dr. Inge) preach in Westminster Abbey
on the 17th Chapter of St. Matthew, verse 19: “Then came the disciples
to Jesus apart, and said, ‘Why could not we cast him out?’”

The sermon was really splendiferous!

The Saviour had just cast out a devil that had been too much for
the disciples, and He told them their inability to do so was due to
their want of Faith, and added: “Howbeit this kind goeth not out but
by prayer.” The Dean explained to us that some ascetic annotator 400
years afterwards had shoved in at the end of these two additional
words--“and fasting.” That, of course, was meant by the Dean as “one
in the eye” for those who fast like the Pharisees and for a pretence
make long prayers! Then the Dean was just too lovely as to “Prayer!”
He said he was so sick of people praying for victory in the great War!
And speaking generally he was utterly sick of people praying for what
they wanted! (as if _that_ was Prayer!) No! the Dean divinely said,
“Prayer was the exaltation of the Spirit of a Man to dwell with God and
say in the Saviour’s words, ‘Not my will but Thine be done.’” “Get
right thus with God,” said the Dean, “and then go and make Guns and
Munitions with the utmost fury. That (said the Dean) was the way to get
Victory, and not by silly vain petitions as if you were asking your
Mamma for a bit of barley sugar.” (I don’t mean to say the Dean used
these exact words!) Then he said an interesting thing that “this event
of the disciples ignominiously failing to cast out the devil” happened
to these chief of His apostles just after their coming down from the
Mount of Transfiguration, where they had been immensely uplifted by the
Heavenly Vision of the Saviour talking with Moses and Elijah. The Dean
said “that it was really a curious fact of large experience that when
you were thus lifted up in a Heavenly Spirit it was a sure precursor
of a fierce temptation by the Devil!” These highly-favoured disciples,
after such a communion with God, thought that they themselves, by
themselves, could do anything! Pride had a fall! They could not cast
out that devil! They trusted in themselves and did not give God the
praise! And so it was that Moses didn’t go over Jordan, for he struck
the rock and said, “How now, ye rebels!” (I’ll show you who I am!)

The Dean also observed that it was the Drains that had to be put right
when there was an Epidemic of Typhoid Fever! “Prayer” wasn’t the
Antidote!

The holy man Saint Francis summed up all religion and the Christian
life in his famous line:

“How we are in the sight of God!--That is the only thing that matters!”

[Illustration:

PHOTOGRAPH, TAKEN AND SENT TO SIR JOHN FISHER BY THE EMPRESS MARIE OF
RUSSIA, OF A GROUP ON BOARD H.M.S. “STANDARD,” 1909.

  1. Lord Hamilton of Dalzell.
  2. The Chevalier de Martino.
  3. Sir Arthur Nicholson.
  4. M. Stolypin, Russian Prime Minister.
  5. The Czarina.
  6. M. Isvolsky, Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs.
  7. Sir John Fisher.
  8. Sir Charles Hardinge.
  9. Baron Fredericks.
  10. The Grand Duchess Olga.
  11. The Czar.
  12. The Princess Victoria.
  13. The Grand Duke Michael.
  14. Count Benckendorff, Russian Ambassador.
]


FORGIVENESS

It fortuned this morning that I read Joseph’s interview with his
Brethren just after the death of their Father Jacob. They, having done
their best to murder Joseph quite naturally thought that he would now
be even with them, so they told a lie. They said that Jacob their
Father had very kindly left word with them that he hoped Joseph would
be very nice with his brethren after he died. Jacob said no such thing.
Jacob knew his Joseph. But it gave Joseph a magnificent opportunity
for reading one of Mr. Robertson’s, of Brighton, Sermons--he said to
them, “Am I in the place of God?” Meaning thereby that no bread and
water that he might put them on, and no torturing thumbscrews, would
in any way approach the unquenchable fire and the undying worm that
the Almighty so righteously reserves for the blackguards of this life.
Which reminds me of the best Sermon I ever heard by the present Dean
of Salisbury, Dr. Page-Roberts. He said: “There is no Bankruptcy Act
in Heaven. No 10s. in the £1 there. Every moral, debt has got to be
paid in full,” and consequently Page-Roberts, though an extremely
broad-minded man, was the same as the extreme Calvinist of the
unspeakable Hell and the Roman Catholic’s Purgatory. How curious it is
how extremes do meet!




CHAPTER IV

EPISODES


I.--MR. GLADSTONE’S FINAL RESIGNATION.

I was Controller of the Navy when Lord Spencer was First Lord of the
Admiralty and Sir Frederck Richards was First Sea Lord. Mr. Gladstone,
then Prime Minister, was at the end of his career. I have never read
Morley’s “Life of Gladstone,” but I understand that the incident I
am about to relate is stated to have been the cause of Mr. Gladstone
resigning--and for the last time. I was the particular Superintending
Lord at the Board of Admiralty, who, as Controller of the Navy, was
specially responsible for the state and condition of the Navy; and
it was my province, when new vessels were required, to replace those
getting obsolete or worn out. Sir Frederick Richards and myself were
on the very greatest terms of intimacy. He had a stubborn will, an
unerring judgment, and an astounding disregard of all arguments. When
anyone, seeking a compromise with him, offered him an alternative, he
always took the alternative as well as the original proposal, and asked
for both. Once bit, twice shy; no one ever offered him an alternative a
second time.

However, he had one great incapacity. No one could write a more
admirable and concise minute; but he was as dumb as Moses. So I became
his Aaron. The moment arrived when that magnificent old patriot,
Lord Spencer, had to choose between fidelity to his life-long friend
and leader, Mr. Gladstone, and his faithfulness to his country. Sir
Frederick Richards, the First Sea Lord, had convinced him that a
certain programme of shipbuilding was vitally and urgently necessary.
Mr. Gladstone would not have it. Sir Frederick Richards and myself, in
quite a nice way, not quite point-blank, intimated that the Sea Lords
would resign. (My bread and cheese was at stake, but I did it!) Lord
Spencer threw in his lot with us, and conveyed the gentle likelihood
to Mr. Gladstone; whereupon Sir William Harcourt and Sir Henry
Campbell-Bannerman were alternately turned on to the three of us (Lord
Spencer, Sir F. Richards and myself) sitting round a table in Lord
Spencer’s private room. I loved Sir William Harcourt; he was what might
be called “a genial ruffian,” as opposed to Sir Michael Hicks-Beach,
who, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, was a perfect beast,
without a single redeeming feature that I ever found out. Sir William
Harcourt always started the conversazione by insulting Lord Spencer
(quite in a friendly way); then he would say to Sir Frederick Richards,
“I always thought that one Englishman was equal to three Frenchmen, and
according to this table of ships required, which has been presented to
the Prime Minister, it takes three Englishmen to manage one Frenchman.”
Old Richards would grow livid with anger; he wanted to say, “It’s a
damned lie!” but he couldn’t get the proper words out!

He had an ungovernable temper. I heard him once say to one of the
principal Officers in his ship: “Here; don’t you look sulky at me, I
won’t have it!” There was a famous one-legged cabman at Portsmouth
whom Sir Frederick Richards hired at Portsmouth railway station by
chance to drive him to the Dockyard. He didn’t recognise the man,
but he was an old ship-mate who had been with him when Sir Frederick
Richards commanded a brig on the coast of Africa, suppressing the Slave
Trade--he led them all a dog’s life. The fare was a shilling, and ample
at that; and as old Richards got out at the Admiral’s door he gave
the cabman five shillings, but the cabby refused it and said to old
Richards: “You _drove_ me for nothing on the Coast of Africa, I will
drive you for nothing now,” and he rattled off, leaving old Richards
speechless with anger. He used to look at Sir William Harcourt in
exactly the same way. I thought he would have apoplexy sometimes.

Dear Lord Spencer was pretty nearly as bad in his want of lucid
exposition; so I usually did Aaron all through with Sir William
Harcourt, and one of the consequences was that we formed a lasting
friendship.

When I was made a Lord, Stead came to my house that very morning and
said he had just had a message from Sir William Harcourt (who had then
been dead for some years), saying how glad Sir William was; and the
curious thing was that five minutes afterwards I got a letter from his
son, now Lord Harcourt, congratulating me on my Peerage, which had only
been made known an hour before. I think Stead said Sir William was in
Heaven. I don’t think he ever quite knew where the departed were!

Campbell-Bannerman was a more awkward customer.

But it was all no use. We got the ships and Mr. Gladstone went.


II.--THE GREAT LORD SALISBURY’S BROTHER-IN-LAW.

It really is very sad that those three almost bulky volumes of my
letters to Lord Esher--which he has so wonderfully kept--could not all
have been published just as they are. This is one of the reasons for
my extreme reluctance, which still exists, for these “Memories” and
“Records” of mine being published in my lifetime. When I was dead there
could be no libel action! The only alternative is to have a new sort of
“Pilgrim’s Progress” published--the whole three volumes--and substitute
Bunyan names. But that would be almost as bad as putting their real
names in--no one could mistake them!

I think I have mentioned elsewhere that Lord Ripon, when First Lord,
whom I had never met, had a design to make me a Lord of the Admiralty,
but his colleagues would not have it and called me “Gambetta.” Lord
Ripon said he had sent for me because someone had maligned me to him
as “a Radical enthusiast.” Well, the upshot was that in 1886 I became
Director of Ordnance of the Navy; and after a time I came to the
definite conclusion that the Ordnance of the Fleet was in a very bad
way, and the only remedy was to take the whole business from the War
Office, who controlled the Sea Ordnance and the munitions of sea war. A
very funny state of affairs!

Lord George Hamilton was then First Lord and the Great Lord Salisbury
was Prime Minister. Lord Salisbury’s brother-in-law was the gentleman
at the War Office who was solely responsible for the Navy deficiencies,
bar the politicians. When they cut down the total of the Army
Estimates, he took it off the Sea Ordnance. He had to, if he wanted to
be on speaking terms with his own cloth. I don’t blame him; I expect I
should have done the same, more particularly as I believe in a Citizen
Army--or, as I have called it elsewhere, a Lord-Lieutenant’s Army. (The
clothes were a bit different; but Lord Kitchener’s Army was uncommonly
like it.) Lord George Hamilton, having patiently heard me, as he always
did, went to Lord Salisbury. Lord George backed me through thick and
thin. The result was a Committee--the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury,
Chairman; W. H. Smith, Secretary for War; Lord George Hamilton, First
Lord of the Admiralty; the Director of Ordnance at the War Office,
and myself. It was really a very remarkably unpleasant time. I had an
awful bad cold--much worse than General Alderson, the Prime Minister’s
brother-in-law--and Lord Salisbury never asked after it, while he
slobbered over Alderson. I just mention that as a straw indicating
which way the wind blew. The result, after immense flagellations
administered to the Director of the Sea Ordnance, was that the whole
business of the munitions of war for the Navy was turned over to
the Admiralty, “lock, stock and gun barrel, bob and sinker,” and by
Herculean efforts and the cordial co-operation of Engelbach, C.B.,
who had fought against me like a tiger, and afterwards helped like an
Angel, and of Sir Ralph Knox, the Accountant-General of the Army, a big
deficit, in fact a criminal deficit, of munitions for the Fleet was
turned over rapidly into a million sterling of surplus.

They are nearly all dead and gone now, who worked this enormous
transfer, and I hope they are all in Heaven.

This story has a lovely sequel; and I forgave Lord Salisbury afterwards
for not asking after my cold when, in 1899, many years after, the Hague
Peace Conference came along and he submitted my name to Queen Victoria
as the Naval Delegate, with the remark that, as I had fought so well
against his brother-in-law, there was no doubt I should fight at the
Peace Conference. So I did, though it was not for Peace; and M. de
Staal, who was a great friend of mine, and who was the President of the
Conference, told me that my remarks about boiling the crews of hostile
submarines in oil when caught, and so forth, were really unfit for
publication. But W. T. Stead tells that story infinitely better than I
can. It is in the “Review of Reviews” for February, 1910.

But there is another providential sequel to the events with which I
began this statement. I made great friends at the Peace Conference with
General Gross von Schwarzhoff and Admiral von Siegel, the Military and
Naval German Delegates, and I then (in 1899) imbibed those ideas as to
the North Sea being our battle ground, which led to the great things
between 1902 and 1910.


III.--SHIP-BUILDING AND DOCKYARD WORKERS.

I have been asked to explain how I got rid of 6,000 redundant Dockyard
workmen, when Mr. Childers nearly wrecked his Government by turning
out but a few hundred. Well, this was how it was done. We brought home
some 160 ships from abroad that could neither fight nor run away;
enough men were thus provided for the fighting portion of the crews
for all the new ships then lying in the Dockyards, which were not
only deteriorating in their hulls and equipment for want of care, but
were inefficient for war because officers and men must have practice
in the ship they fight as much as the Bisley shot with his rifle, the
jockey with his race-horse and the chef with his sauces. It is practice
that makes perfect. The original plan for mobilising the Navy for war
was that on the outbreak of war you disorganised the ships already
fully manned and efficient by taking a portion of the trained crew,
thus impairing the efficiency of that ship, and putting them into the
un-manned ships and filling up both the old and the new--the former
efficient ships and those in the dockyards--with men from the Reserve.
So the whole Navy got disorganised. And that was what they called
“Preparing for War!” By what Mr. Balfour called a courageous stroke of
the pen, in his speech at Manchester, when he was Prime Minister, every
vessel in the Fleet by the new system had its fighting crew complete.

Those who were to fill up the hiatus were the hewers of wood and the
drawers of water. The brains were there; only the beef had to come, and
the beef might have been taken from the Army.

When are we going to have the great Army and Navy Co-operative Society,
which I set forth to King Edward in 1903--that the Army should be a
Reserve for the Navy? When shall we be an amphibious nation? This last
war has made us into a conscript Nation.

Well, to revert to the subject of how we got rid of the 6,000 redundant
dockyard workmen. When that mass of Officers and men set free by the
scrapping of the 160 ships that couldn’t fight nor run away came back
to Chatham, Portsmouth, Devonport, Pembroke, and Queenstown, then in
those dockyard towns the tradesmen had the time of their lives, for the
money that had flowed into the pockets of the Chinese, the Chileans,
the Peruvians, the Boers, the Brazilians, made the shopkeepers of the
dockyard towns into a mass of Liptons, so that when the 6,000 Dockyard
workers tried, as they had done in the time of yore (in the time of
Childers), to get the dockyard tradespeople to agitate and turn out
their Members of Parliament, the tradespeople simply replied, “You
be damned!” and I arranged to find congenial occupation for these
redundant dockyard workmen in private yards where they were much needed.

When I became Admiral Superintendent of Portsmouth Dockyard, I took
another drastic step in concentrating all the workmen then leisurely
building several different ships, and put them all like a hive of bees
on to one ship and extended piece-work to the utmost limit that was
conceivable. The result was that a battleship which would have taken
three years to build was built in one year; for the work of building a
ship is so interlaced, when they are working by piece-work especially,
that if one man does not work his fellow workmen cannot earn so much,
so this piece-work helps the overseers because the men oversee each
other.

But there is another great principle which this hides. The one great
secret of the fighting value of a battleship is to get her to sea
quickly:--

    “Build few, and build fast,
    Each one better than the last.”

You will come across some idiots whose minds are so deliciously
symmetrical that they would prefer ten tortoises to one greyhound to
catch a hare, and it was one of the principal articles of the ancient
creed that you built ships in batches. They strained at the gnat of
uniformity and so swallowed the camel of inferiority. No progress--they
were a batch.


IV.--“JOLLY AND HUSTLE.”

I have just been asked by an alluring, though somewhat elusive
friend, to describe to you quite an excellent illustration of those
famous words in “Ecclesiastes” “Cast thy bread upon the waters for
thou shalt find it after many days.” That’s the text this alluring
friend suggested to me to exemplify. For myself, I prefer the more
heavenly text where the Scripture says: “Be not forgetful to entertain
strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” It was
quite an angel that I had to do with, and he ate my bread as follows:--

One day, when I was Admiral in North America, I received a telegram:
“The President of the Grand Trunk Railway with forty distinguished
American friends was arriving in about an hour’s time on some business
connected with railway affairs, and could they be permitted to see the
battleship ‘Renown.’” The “Renown” was my flagship. I sent a reply to
the next station their special train was stopping at, asking them to
lunch on board on their arrival at 1 p.m. I sent for Monsieur Augé, my
wonderful chef, who on the produce of his service with me afterwards
set up a restaurant in Paris (he really was excellent--but so
extravagant!) and told him: “Lunch for forty, in an hour’s time.” All
he said was “Oui, Monsieur,” and he did it well! I myself being really
amazed.

The Company greatly enjoyed themselves. I had some wonderful champagne
obtained from Admiral McCrea--of immortal memory as regards that
requisite--which effectively seconded M. Augé’s magnificent lunch.

Years after--it was in March, 1902--I was in a serious dilemma as to
the completion of the necessary buildings at Osborne for the new scheme
of entry of Officers to be inaugurated by the King in person, who was
to open the new establishment on the fourth day of August following.
Every effort had failed to get a satisfactory contract, when after a
prolonged but fruitless discussion, I was sitting thinking what the
devil I should do, when an Officer came in to see me on some business
and mentioned casually that he had just come from lunching at the
Carlton and had happened to overhear a man at an adjacent table say
that he would give anything to see Sir John Fisher, as he had given
him--with many others--the very best lunch he had ever had in his life.
I sent the Officer back to the Carlton to bring him. On his arrival
in my room I didn’t remember him, but he at once thanked me--not for
seeing the “Renown” and all the other things--but only for the lunch.
He said he belonged to St. Louis and was over in England on business.
He had completed a big hotel in three months, which no one else would
contract to build under three years.

Then I thought of that angel whom I had entertained unawares; certainly
the bread that was cast came back all right. I explained my difficulty
to him--I had all the particulars. He said he had his American staff
over here, who had been working at the Hotel, and he would attend with
the contract and the drawings in forty-eight hours. And he did. The
contract was signed, and King Edward opened the buildings on August 4th.

An expert of our own who participated in the final proceedings asked
the American gentleman’s foreman how he did it, and especially how he
had managed that hotel in the three months. I overheard the American’s
answer: “Well,” he said, “this is how our boss does it; when he is
a-laying of the foundations he is a-thinking of the roof.” “What is his
name?” said the English expert. “Well,” replied the American, “his
name is Stewart, but we always call him ‘JOLLY & HUSTLE.’” “Oh!” said
the English expert, “Why that name?” “Well,” he says, “I will tell
you. There’s not one of his workmen, not even the lower grades, gets
less than fifteen shillings a day, and as much as he likes to eat and
drink--free of cost. Well, that’s _jolly_. But we has to work sixteen
hours a day--that’s _hustle_.”

So when the defences of the Humber came into my mind and no contractor
could be got for so gigantic a business, I telegraphed for “Jolly &
Hustle,” and when he came over and said he would do it and that he
was going to bring everything, from a pin up to a pile-driver, from
America, it made the contractors at home reconsider the position--and
they did the work.


V.--“BUYING UP OPPORTUNITIES.”

The words I take to head this section are as applicable to the affairs
of common life as they are to religion, with reference to which they
were originally spoken.

What these words signify is that Faith governs all things. Victories on
Earth have as their foundation the same saving virtue of Faith.

One great exercise of Faith is “Redeeming the Time,” as Paul says.
(I’m told the literal meaning of the original Greek is “buying up
opportunities.”) Most people from want of Faith won’t try again. Lord
Kelvin often used to tell me of his continuous desire of “redeeming
the time.” Even in dressing himself he sought every opportunity of
saving time (so he told me) in thinking of the next operation. However
his busy brain sometimes got away from the business in hand, as he
once put his necktie in his pocket and his handkerchief round his
neck. (Another wonderfully clever friend of mine, who used to think
in the Differential Calculus, I once met immaculately dressed, but he
had his trousers over his arm and not on.) And yet I am told he was
an extraordinarily acute business man. Every sailor owes him undying
gratitude for his “buying up opportunities” in the way he utilised
a broken thigh, which compelled him to go in a yacht, to invent
his marvellous compass and sounding machine. At the Bombardment of
Alexandria the firing of the eighty ton guns of the “Inflexible” with
maximum charges, which blew my cap off my head and nearly deafened
me, had no effect on his compasses, and enabled us with supreme
advantage to keep the ship steaming about rapidly and so get less
often hit whilst at the same time steering the ship with accuracy
amongst the shoals. So it was with the ancient sounding machine: one
had to stop the ship to sound, and it was a laborious operation and
inaccurate. Lord Kelvin devised a glass tube which by the height of the
discoloration gave you the exact depth, no matter how fast the ship was
going; and the beauty of it was you kept the tubes as a register.

It was an immense difficulty getting the Admiralty to adopt Lord
Kelvin’s compass. I was reprimanded for having them on board. I always
asked at a Court-Martial, no matter what the prisoner was being tried
for, whether they had Lord Kelvin’s compass on board. It was only
ridicule that got rid of the old Admiralty compass. At the inquiry the
Judge asked me whether the Admiralty compass was sensitive (I was a
witness for Lord Kelvin). I replied, “No, you had to kick it to get
a move on.” But what most scandalised the dear old Fossil who then
presided over the Admiralty compass department was that I wanted to do
away with the points of the compass and mark it into the three hundred
and sixty degrees of the circle (you might as well have asked them to
do away with salt beef and rum!). There could then never be any mistake
as to the course the ship should steer. However, a landsman won’t
understand the beauty of this simplicity, and the “Old Salts” said at
that time “There he is again--the d--d Revolutionary!”

But to revert to “buying up opportunities”: I know no more signal
instance of the goodness of Paul’s advice both to the Ephesians
and Colossians in things temporal as in things spiritual than
as exemplified by the Gunnery Lieutenant of the “Inflexible” in
discovering a fracture in one of her eighty-ton guns. He was always
thinking ahead in everything--“Buying up Opportunities.”

After the Bombardment of Alexandria we two were walking along the
shore; he stopped and said, “Hullo! that’s a bit of one of our shell,
and it burst in the bore of the gun.” As there were no end of pieces
of burst shell about, which had exploded in striking the fort, I said,
“How do you know it is?” He pointed to the marks of the rifling on
the shell, which showed that it had burst in the bore and had been
pressed into the grooves of the rifling, instead of being rotated by
the copper band on its passage through the bore. Then he put his hand
in his pocket, took out his clinometer, laid it on the marks of the
rifling on the bit of burst shell; and the rifling of our eighty-ton
guns having an increasing spiral, he calculated the exact spot in the
gun where the shell had burst. And when he got on board he had himself
shoved up the bore of the gun holding a piece of hot gutta percha,
like that with which the dentist takes the impression of your mouth
for a set of false teeth, and brought me out the impression of where
the gun had been cracked by the explosion of the shell. Younghusband
was his name--perhaps the most gifted man I ever met, but, as unusual
with genius, he was not indolent and was always practising himself in
seizing opportunities. When the constituted authorities came to inspect
the gun, though Younghusband put the broken bit of shell before them,
they took a long time to find that crack. One night at Portsmouth
someone told Younghusband, who was having his third glass of port after
dinner, that he was too fat to walk. For a considerable bet he got up
there and then and walked seventy-two miles to London. Younghusband
never went to any school in his life; he never left home; he never had
a governess or a tutor. He was taught by his mother.


VI.--HOW THE GREAT WAR WAS CARRIED ON.

Six weeks after I left the Admiralty on May 22nd, 1915--that deplorable
day, the particulars of which I am not at present at liberty to
mention--I received most cordial letters from both Mr. Asquith and Mr.
Balfour welcoming me to fill a Post of great magnitude.

[Illustration: A GROUP ON BOARD H.M.S. “STANDARD,” 1909.

The Czar, The Grand Duchess Olga, and Sir John Fisher.]

I am impelled to digress here for a few moments to tell a very
excellent story of Dean Hole (famous for the cultivation of roses).
He said to his Curate one day, “I am sick of hearing the name of that
poor man whom we pray for every Sunday; just say ‘the prayers of the
Congregation are requested for a member of the Congregation who is
grievously ill.’” Next Sunday the Curate said at the usual place in
Divine Service, “The prayers of the Congregation are requested for a
gentleman whose name I’m not at liberty to mention!” That’s my case in
regard to what happened between Saturday, May 15th, and Saturday, May
22nd, during which time I received communications which I hold in my
hand at this moment, and which some day when made public will be just
astonishing! I am advised that the Law does not permit even an outline
of them to be given.

I was invited by Mr. Balfour to preside over an Assemblage of the
most Eminent Men of Science for War purposes; the chief point was the
German Submarine Menace. Also we had to consider Inventions, as well as
Scientific Research.

My three Super-Eminent Colleagues of the Central Committee of this
great Scientific Organisation were very famous men:--

(1) Sir J. J. Thomson, O.M., President of the Royal Society and now
Master of Trinity. I am told (and I believe it) a man unparalleled in
Science.

(2) The Hon. Sir Charles Parsons, K.C.B., the Inventor of the Turbine,
which has changed the whole art of Marine Engineering, and enabled
us to sink Admiral von Spee. We couldn’t have sunk von Spee without
Parsons’s Turbine, as those two great Fast Battle-Cruisers “Invincible”
and “Inflexible” could not have steamed otherwise 14,000 miles without
a hitch (there and back). They only arrived at the Falkland Islands a
few hours before Admiral von Spee.

(3) Sir George Beilby, F.R.S., one of the greatest of Chemists, who,
if we don’t take care, will give us a smokeless England, by getting
rid of coal in its present beastly form, and turning it into oil and
fertilisers, dyes, etc., etc. The Refuse he sells to the Poor fifty per
cent. cheaper than coal and without smoke or ashes.

The Advisory Panel of other Distinguished Men was as famous as these
Magi. There were also many Eminent Associates.

I felt extreme diffidence in occupying the Chair; however, I put it to
them all in the famous couplet of the French author who, in annexing
the thoughts of other people, took this couplet as the text of his
book:--

    “I have cull’d a garland of flowers,
    Mine only is the string that binds them.”

I said to them all at our first Assemblage: “Gentlemen, You are the
Flowers, I am the String!”

You would have thought that such a Galaxy of Talent would have been
revered, welcomed, and obeyed--on the contrary, it was derided,
spurned, and ignored.

The permanent “Expert Limpets” did for us! All the three First Lords at
the Admiralty whom we dealt with in succession were most cordial and
most appreciative, but all three were equally powerless. Just a couple
or so of instances will suffice to illustrate the reason why we at last
said to Sir Eric Geddes:--

    “Ave Geddes Imperator!
    “Morituri te Salutant.”

    (1) The chief object of this magnificent Scientific
    Organisation being to counter the German Submarine Menace, we
    naturally asked for a Submarine to experiment with. The answer
    was “one could not be spared.”

    (2) We asked to be furnished with all the details of the
    destruction of German Submarines that had already taken place,
    which of course lay at the root of further investigation. This
    was denied us!

    (3) A “Submarine Detector” was developed under the auspices
    of the Central Committee by May, 1916. A year was allowed to
    elapse before it was taken up; and even then its progress was
    cancelled because nothing more than a laboratory experiment
    with a competing invention came to the notice of the “Limpets.”

    (4) The Scientific Members of our Association had conceived
    and practically demonstrated a most astoundingly simple method
    of discovering the passage of German Submarines. It was termed
    “The Loop Detection” scheme. It was turned down--And then two
    years afterwards was violently taken up, with astoundingly
    successful results.

I think I have said enough. And really, after all, what is the good of
raking up the past?

I have had two pieces of advice given me referring to the trials I had
experienced. One was:--

    “When sinners entice thee, consent thou not!--
    But take the name and address for future reference.”

And the other was:--“Fear less--hope more; eat less--chew more;
whine less--breathe more (deep breathing); talk less--say more; hate
less--love more, and all good things are yours.”




CHAPTER V

DEMOCRACY

“_Government of the people--by the people--for the people._”

                      (_President Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, 1863._)


Some time ago the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University presided at a
lecture on Democracy given at Cambridge by the Professor of History at
Chicago (A. C. McLaughlin). I gather that he implied that Democracy is
helpless in the game of secret diplomacy and secret treaties. Democracy
now all depends upon the purpose and desire of the English-speaking
people.

It’s an opportune moment to repeat John Bright’s very famous speech on
a great federation of the nations that speak the Anglo-Saxon tongue.

The speech was given me when crossing the Atlantic by a splendid
citizen of the United States, where I had just been receiving boundless
hospitality and a wonderful welcome, and had realised the truth about a
prophet when not in his own country, and had been asked to “stump the
Middle West” to advocate the cause of friendship amongst all those who
speak our incomparable tongue, and to establish a Great Commonwealth of
Free Nations. There can be no secret treaties and no secret diplomacy
when the Government is of the People, by the People, for the People.

This is John Bright’s speech:

    “Now what can one say of the future of our race and of our
    kinsmen? Is that merely a dream? By no means.... Look where we
    are now?...

    “In this country, in Canada, and in the United States there
    are, or soon will be, one hundred and fifty millions of
    population, nearly all of whom owe their birth and origin to
    the comparatively small country in which we live. It is a fact
    that is not paralleled in any past history, and what may come
    in the future to compare with it or excel it, it is not for
    us to speak of, or even with any show of reason to imagine;
    but we have in all these millions the same language, the same
    literature, mainly the same laws and the institutions of
    freedom. May we not hope for the highest and noblest federation
    to be established among us? That is a question to which I would
    ask your special and sympathetic attention. The noblest kind
    of federation among us, under different Governments it may be,
    but united by race, by sympathy, by freedom of industry, by
    communion of interests and by a perpetual peace, we may help to
    lead the world to that better time which we long for and which
    we believe in, though it may not be permitted to our mortal
    eyes to behold it.”

That was said by John Bright.

The time has now come for this great federation which he desired--for
this great Commonwealth of Free Nations.

There is only one type of treaty which is effective--“Community of
Interests.”

All other treaties are “Scraps of Paper.”

It is maintained by eminent men that the late appalling and disastrous
war, in which so many millions of human beings have been massacred or
maimed, would never have occurred _had there been a real Democracy in
power in England_. They say, as a small instance, that the great Mutiny
at the Nore and other mutinies were brought about by trampling on
Democracy.

This is what pure and unadulterated Democracy is, and we have not got
it in England:--

                      “EQUAL OPPORTUNITY FOR ALL.”

For instance, no parent with less than nearly a £1000 a year can now
send his boy into the Navy as an Officer!

Nature is no respecter of birth or money power when she lavishes her
mental and physical gifts.

    _We fight God when our Social System dooms the brilliant clever
    child of the poor man to the same level as his father._

Therefore, we must have such State provision and such State education
as will enable the very poorest in the land to let their eligible
children rise to Admirals, Generals, Ambassadors, and Statesmen.

Can it be conceived that a real Democracy would have permitted secret
treaties such as have been divulged to us, or have scouted the terms of
Peace which were allowed only to be seen by Kings and Prime Ministers;
or would a real Democracy have flouted the Russian Revolution in its
first agonizing throes when gasping for help and recognition?

In a real Democracy, would true Labour leaders have waited on the
doormat?

Would a real Democracy wave the red rag of “Empire” in front of these
noble self-governing peoples all speaking our tongue in their own free
Parliaments, and all of them praying for the hastening of the time when
“England, the Mother of Free Parliaments, shall herself be free”?

But the Glorious Epoch is now fast approaching!

A Prime Minister once complimented me on a casual saying of mine at his
luncheon table. I was accounting for part of my success against

                     “Many giants great and tall,”

and I ventured to state that:--

    “The secret of successful administration was the intelligent
    anticipation of agitation.”

_Anticipate the Revolution._ Do the thing yourself in your way before
the agitators get in before you and do it in their way. Get rid of
the present obsolete Forms and Antique Ceremonies which grate on the
masses, and of Figureheads who are laughing-stocks, and of sinecures
which are exasperating--and so anticipate another Cromwell, who is
certainly now coming fast along to “Remove another Bauble!”

I forget what they did to the man who tried to import poisonous snakes
into New Zealand (finding that happy island unblessed with this
commodity). It was something quite drastic they did to _him_! They
killed the snakes.

The Canadian House of Commons adopted by a majority of 33 a motion by
Sir Robert Borden, on behalf of the Canadian Government, asking that
no more hereditary titles should be bestowed in Canada, and declaring
that the Canadian Government should make all recommendations for
honours of any kind. This motion was a compromise designed to damp down
the popular outcry against titles which has arisen in Canada. In one
debate Sir Wilfrid Laurier offered to throw his own title on a common
bonfire. He urged that all titles in Canada should be abolished.

Why should Great Britain lag behind Canada and the United States?
Hereditary titles are ludicrously out of date in any modern democracy,
and the sooner we sweep away all the gimcracks and gewgaws of snobbery
the better. The fount of so-called honour has become a deluge, and the
newspapers are hard put to it to find room for even the spray of the
deluge.

The war has not begotten simplicity and austerity in this respect. On
the contrary, it has made what used to be a comedy a screaming farce.
There was a time when the Birthday Honours List could be printed on
one day, but it is now a serial novel. The first chapter of the latest
Birthday list was long, but the _Times_ warned us that it was only “the
first of a series which already threatens to outlast the week--quite
apart from the gigantic Order of the British Empire.”

Chicago’s great Professor of History, Mr. McLaughlin, made the
statement at the Kingsway Hall, in his address to British teachers,
that now the United States have over 100 millions of people, and fifty
years from now they may well have 200 millions--a great Atlantic and
Pacific Power. The Professor added that this great War was “_to
protect Democracy against the greatest menace it has ever had_” (in the
present rule of Kings and Secret Treaties, etc., etc.). Another points
out as a striking example of present old-time conditions (so pernicious
to freedom and efficiency) the positive fact now existing that our
Military Leaders, by a class distinction, were only selected from one
twenty-fifth of the ore which we have at our disposal though we had
brought five million men under arms, as all our generals commanding
armies, army corps, divisions, and in most cases brigades, were drawn
from among the Regular Forces who handled our small pre-War Army of two
hundred thousand men. And the writer adds:

    “If considered purely from the standpoint of the law of
    averages, one would expect to find more good brains if one
    searched the entire Army than in merely looking for material in
    one twenty-fifth of it.”

General Currie, who so ably commands all the Canadian Forces, was
a Land Agent before the War. Neither Napoleon nor Wellington ever
commanded a regiment. Marlborough never handled an army till he was
fifty-two years of age. Clive was a Bank Clerk. Napoleon’s maxim was
“_La carrière ouverte aux talents_.” Are we ever going to adopt it?


PEACE

This truth is (_and ever will be_) the fact that the only pact that
ever holds, and the only treaty that ever lasts is:

                       “_COMMUNITY OF INTEREST!_”

and we can only have Community of Interest in the masses of a People
always being on the side of Peace, because it’s the masses who are
massacred, not the Kings and Generals and Politicians (they are
plentifully fed and comfortably housed, and have the best white
bread--_vide_ the American Dentist, Davies, when he stayed with the
German Emperor).

Well! the only way the masses of the People can act effectively is by
means of Republics. Because then no secret diplomacy ever answers, and
no one man can make war, or no coterie of men. In a Republic we get
“Government of the People, by the People, for the People.”

It’s a cheap sneer to ask how long the same Government ever exists
in Republican France! Nevertheless, sooner millions of changes of
Government and Peace than a stable Government with War! _A Republic is
always Peace-loving!_ except when righteous fury in a gust of popular
rage sweeps it into war, as lately in America; but it took four years
to move them! The People pushed the President. We are going to have
Bolshevism unless we foster these German Republics, and it will spread
righteously to England.

These Leagues of Nations and Freedoms of the Seas and all the other
items are all d--d nonsense! When War does come, then “Might is Right.”
“La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure!” and every treaty is
a Scrap of Paper!

  The Essence of War is Violence.
  Moderation in War is Imbecility.
  You hit first, you hit hard, and keep on hitting.
  You have to be Ruthless, Relentless and Remorseless.
  It’s perfect rot to talk about “Civilised Warfare!”
  You might as well talk about a “Heavenly Hell!”


FROM LORD FISHER TO A FRIEND.

    MY DEAR ----,

    I wrote to a distinguished friend to note (but not to
    congratulate him) that he had been made “a Companion of
    Honour” (what that is I don’t know!), and told him one of the
    disadvantages of even a “Limited Monarchy” was the making
    of us all into Christmas Trees to hang Decorations upon! He
    replied he had declined it, as he did not wish “to be regarded
    as a dab of paint to camouflage this new Order instituted for
    Labour Leaders!” Haven’t I always told you we are a Nation of
    Snobs, and that even the Labour Leaders don’t resent being kept
    hanging about on the door mat?

    My dear friend adds: “I feel sure your conception of Democracy
    will be realised.” (I had sent him my Paper on Democracy that
    you didn’t like!) “_Liberty means a Country where every man or
    woman has an equal chance._”

    “The race of Life in a civilised Country is a race carried
    out under a system of handicaps, and the people who do the
    handicapping are the people of the least brains.

    “The prophecy you send me is wonderful.”

    I think the words of this my friend will interest you, _though
    perhaps not convince you_!

                                         Yours till death,
                                                           F.
                                                             9/6/18.


THE BATTLE HYMN OF THE REPUBLIC.

I have been sitting this morning under a Presbyterian Minister, Dr.
Hugh Black, whose eloquence so moved the Prime Minister, Mr. Lloyd
George (who kindly gave me a seat in his pew, on the other side of me
being President Wilson, at the Presbyterian Church in Paris on May
25th, 1919), that the moment the service was ended the Prime Minister
went straight to him in the pulpit and told him it was one of the
best sermons he had ever heard. And it probably was. One word Dr.
Black used was very descriptive. He described us all, except those
homeless ones for whom the Saviour pleaded in Dr. Black’s text, as the
“sheltered” classes. I think also our feelings in the congregation
(not that I wish to derogate from the sermon) had been intensely moved
by the magnificent singing on the part of the great congregation
(mostly American Citizens) of the Battle Hymn of the American Republic,
composed by Julia Ward Howe. The tune (“John Brown’s Body”), as Mr.
Sankey said, no doubt has much to do with the glorious emphasis of the
chorus; but certainly the words are magnificent:--

                      BATTLE HYMN OF THE REPUBLIC.

    Mine eyes have seen the Glory of the Coming of the Lord;
    He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
    He hath loosed the fatal lightning of His terrible swift sword,
    His truth is marching on.

          Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
          Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! His truth is marching on.

    I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps;
    They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
    I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps,
    His day is marching on.

                Glory, etc.

    I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel;
    “As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal”
    Let the Hero born of woman crush the serpent with His heel,
    Since God is marching on.

                Glory, etc.

    He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
    He is sifting out the hearts of men before His Judgment seat;
    Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!
    Our God is marching on.

                Glory, etc.

    In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea;
    With the glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me;
    As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
    While God is marching on.

                Glory, etc.

It reminded me of the 76th Psalm, sung by those old Covenanters when
they vanquished Claverhouse at Drumclog. We see the Battle Field of
Drumclog from the room where we are now talking.

    “In Judah’s land God is well known,
    His name’s in Isr’l great.”

I began a letter (but diffidence made me stop it) to Sir William Watson
the poet, to ask him if he couldn’t give us some such great Hymn for
the Nation.

“God Save the King” is worn out. We don’t individualise now. It is as
worn out as knee breeches for Court Functions or Gold Lace Coats for
Sea Officers.




CHAPTER VI

PUBLIC SPEECHES


I have made four accurately reported public speeches, the fifth one
(at Mr. Josephus Daniels’s reception by the American Luncheon Club) is
too inadequate to include here. For none of these four speeches had
I any notes, except for the one of a hundred words and one of fifty
words, both delivered in the House of Lords. The other two were simply
and solely my exuberant verbosity, and they must be read with that
remark in mind. I was saturated with the subject; and when the _Times_
reporter came and asked me for my speech before I’d made it, I told him
with truth that I really didn’t know what I was going to say. I might
have been like Thackeray (What a classic case his was!). He was the
Guest of Honour. He got up, was vociferously cheered, and was dumb.
After a death-like silence he said these words, and sat down:--“If I
could only remember what I thought of to say to you when I was coming
here in the cab, you really would have had a delightful speech!”

[Illustration: A GROUP ON BOARD H.M.S. “STANDARD,” 1909.

  1. The Empress Marie of Russia.
  2. The Czarina.
  3. Sir John Fisher.
  4. The Grand Duchess Olga.
  5. The Czar.
]


I.--THE ROYAL ACADEMY BANQUET, 1903.

The Navy always readily appreciates the kind words in which this
toast is proposed, and also the kind manner in which it is always
received. I beg to thank you especially, Mr. President, for your
kind reference to Captain Percy Scott, which was so well deserved.
He was indeed a handy man. (Cheers.) Personally I have not the same
pleasurable feelings on this occasion as I enjoyed last year, when
I had no speech to make. I remember quite well remarking to my
neighbour: “How good the whitebait is, how excellent the champagne,
and how jolly not to have to make a speech.” He glared at me and
said: “I have got to make a speech, and the whitebait to me is _bête
noire_, and the champagne is real pain.” (Laughter.) He was so ready
with his answer that I thought to myself: “You’ll get through it all
right,” and sure enough he did, for he spoke thirty minutes by the
clock without a check. (Laughter.) I am only going to give you three
minutes (cries of “No.”) Yes. I always think on these occasions of
the first time I went to sea on board my first ship, an old sailing
two-decker, and I saw inscribed in great big gold letters the one word
“Silence.” (Laughter.) Underneath was another good motto: “Deeds, not
words.” (Cheers.) I have put that into every ship I have commanded
since. (Cheers.) This leads me to another motto which is better
still, and brings me to the point of what I have to say in reply to
the toast that has been proposed. When I was Commander-in-Chief in
the Mediterranean I went to inspect a small Destroyer, only 260 tons,
but with such pride and swagger that she might have been 16,000 tons.
(Laughter.) The young Lieutenant in command took me round. She was
in beautiful order, and I came aft to the wheel and saw there the
inscription: “Ut Veniant Omnes.” “Hallo,” I said, “what the deuce is
that?” (Laughter.) Saluting me, he said: “Let ’em all come, Sir.”
(Great laughter and cheers.) Well, that was not boasting; that was
the sense of conscious efficiency--(cheers)--the sense that permeates
the whole Fleet--(cheers)--and I used to think, as the Admiral, it
will be irresistible provided the Admiral is up to the mark. The Lord
Chief Justice, sitting near me now, has kindly promised to pull me
down if I say too much! (Laughter.) But what I wish to remark to you
is this--and it is a good thing for everybody to know it--there has
been a tremendous change in Navy matters since the old time. In regard
to Naval warfare history is a record of exploded ideas. (Laughter and
cheers.) In the old days they were sailors’ battles; now they are
Admirals’ battles. I should like to recall to you the greatest battle
at sea ever fought. What was the central episode of that? Nelson
receiving his death-wound! What was he doing? Walking up and down
on the quarter-deck arm-in-arm with his Captain. It is dramatically
described to us by an onlooker. His Secretary is shot down; Nelson
turns round and says: “Poor Scott! Take him down to the cockpit,” and
then he goes on again walking up and down, having a yarn with his
Captain. What does that mean? It means that in the old days the Admiral
took his fleet into action; each ship got alongside the enemy; and,
as Nelson finely said, “they got into their proper place.” (Cheers.)
And then the Admiral had not much more to do. The ships were touching
one another nearly, the Bos’un went with some rope and lashed them
together so as to make them quite comfortable--(laughter)--and the
sailors loaded and fired away till it was time to board. But what is
the case now? It is conceivable that within twenty minutes of sighting
the enemy on the horizon the action will have begun, and on the
disposition of his Fleet by the Admiral--on his tactics--the battle
will depend, for all the gunnery in the world is no good if the guns
are masked by our own ships or cannot bear on the enemy! In that way
I wish to tell you how much depends on the Admirals now and on their
education. Therefore, joined with this spirit, of which the remark of
the young Lieutenant I mentioned to you is an indication, permeating
the whole Service, we require a fearless, vigorous, and progressive
administration, open to any reform--(loud cheers)--never resting on its
oars--for to stop is to go back--and forecasting every eventuality. I
will just take two instances at hazard.

    _Look at the Submarine Boat and Wireless Telegraphy.

    When they are perfected we do not know what a Revolution will
    come about._

    In their inception they were the weapons of the weak.

    Now they loom large as the weapons of the strong.

    _Will any Fleet be able to be in narrow waters?_

Is there the slightest fear of invasion with them, even for the most
extreme pessimist? I might mention other subjects; but the great fact
which I come to is that we are realizing--the Navy and the Admiralty
are realizing--_that on the British Navy rests the British Empire_.
(Loud cheers.) Nothing else is of any use without it, not even
the Army. (Here the gallant Admiral, amid laughter, turned to Mr.
Brodrick, the Secretary for War, who sat near him.) We are different
from Continental nations. No soldier of ours can go anywhere unless a
sailor carries him there on his back. (Laughter.) I am not disparaging
the Army. I am looking forward to their coming to sea with us again as
they did in the old days. Why, Nelson had three regiments of infantry
with him at the battle of Cape St. Vincent, and a Sergeant of the
69th Regiment led the boarders, and, Nelson having only one arm, it
was the Sergeant who helped him up. (Cheers.) The Secretary for War
particularly asked me to allude to the Army or else I would not have
done it. (Loud laughter.) In conclusion, I assure you that the Navy
and the Admiralty recognise their responsibility. I think I may say
that we now have a Board of Admiralty that is united, progressive, and
determined--(cheers)--and you may sleep quietly in your beds--(loud
cheers).


II.--THE LORD MAYOR’S BANQUET, 1907.

As to the strength, the efficiency, and the sufficiency of the
Navy, I am able to give you indisputable proofs. Recently, in the
equinoctial season in the North Sea we have had twenty-six of the
finest battleships in the world and twenty-five of the finest cruisers,
some of them equal to foreign battleships, and over fifty other
vessels, under eleven Admirals, and all working under a distinguished
Commander-in-Chief, under very trying circumstances and in a very
stormy time, and I look in vain to see any equal to that large Fleet
anywhere. (Cheers.) That is only a fraction of our power. (Cheers.)
And that large Fleet is _nulli secundus_, as they say, whether it is
ships or officers or men. (Cheers.) Now, I turn to the other point,
the gunnery of the Fleet. The gunnery efficiency of the Fleet has
surpassed all records--it is unparalleled--and I am lost in wonder
and admiration at the splendid unity of spirit and determination that
must have been shown by everybody from top to bottom to obtain these
results. (Cheers.) I am sure that your praise and your appreciation
will go forth to them, because, remember, the best ships, the biggest
Navy--my friend over there talked about the two-Power standard--a
million-Power standard (laughter) is no use unless you can hit.
(Cheers.) You must hit first, you must hit hard, and you must keep
on hitting. (Cheers.) If these are the fruits, I don’t think there
is much wrong with the government of the Navy. (Cheers.) Figs don’t
grow on thistles. (Laughter and cheers.) But a gentleman of fine
feeling has lately said that the recent Admiralty administration has
been attended with the devil’s own luck. (Laughter.) That interesting
personality (laughter)--his luck is due to one thing, and one thing
only--hesitates at nothing to gain his object. That is what the Board
of Admiralty have done, and our object has been the fighting efficiency
of the Fleet and its instant readiness for war; and we have got it.
(Cheers.) And I say it because no one can have a fuller knowledge than
myself about it, and I speak with the fullest sense of responsibility.
(Cheers.) So I turn to all of you, and I turn to my countrymen and
I say--Sleep quiet in your beds (laughter and cheers), and do not be
disturbed by these bogeys--invasion and otherwise--which are being
periodically resuscitated by all sorts of leagues. (Laughter.) I do
not know what league is working this one. It is quite curious what
reputable people lend themselves to these scares. This afternoon I read
the effusions of a red-hot and most charmingly interesting magazine
editor. He had evidently been victimised by a _Punch_ correspondent,
and that _Punch_ correspondent had been gulled by some Midshipman Easy
of the Channel Fleet. He had been there. And this is what the magazine
editor prints in italics in this month’s magazine--that an army of
100,000 German soldiers had been practising embarking in the German
Fleet. The absolute truth is that one solitary regiment was embarked
for manœuvres. That is the truth. To embark 100,000 soldiers you want
hundreds and thousands of tons of transport. You might just as well
talk of practising embarking St. Paul’s Cathedral in a penny steamer.
(Laughter.) I have no doubt that equally silly stories are current in
Germany. I have no doubt that there is terror there that the English
Fleet will swoop down all of a sudden and gobble up the German Fleet.
(Laughter.) These stories are not only silly--they are mischievous,
very mischievous. (Hear, hear.) If Eve had not kept on looking at that
apple (laughter)--and it was pleasant to the eyes--she would not have
picked it, and we should not have been now bothered with clothes.
(Loud laughter.) I was very nearly forgetting something else that
the _Punch_ correspondent said. I put it in my pocket as I came away
to read it out to you. He had been a week in the Channel Fleet and he
had discussed everything, from the admiral down to the bluejacket.
He does not say anything about that Midshipman Easy. “In one matter
I found unanimity of admission. It was that in respect to the number
of fighting ships, their armament, and general capacity the British
Navy was never in so satisfactory a condition as it floats to-day.”
(Cheers.) So we let him off that yarn about the 100,000 German troops.
(Laughter.)


III.--THE HOUSE OF LORDS, NOVEMBER 16, 1915.

Lord Fisher, rising from the cross-benches immediately before public
business was called, said:--“I ask leave of your lordships to make a
statement. Certain references were made to me in a speech delivered
yesterday by Mr. Churchill. I have been 61 years in the service of
my country, and I leave my record in the hands of my countrymen. The
Prime Minister said yesterday that Mr. Churchill had said one or two
things which he had better not have said, and that he necessarily
and naturally left unsaid some things which will have to be said. I
am content to wait. It is unfitting to make personal explanations
affecting national interests when my country is in the midst of a great
war.”

Lord Fisher, having delivered his brief statement, immediately left the
House.


IV.--THE HOUSE OF LORDS, MARCH 21, 1917.

Lord Fisher addressed the House of Lords.

Immediately prayers were over he rose from a seat on one of the
cross-benches. He said:--

“With your Lordships’ permission, I desire to make a personal
statement. When our country is in great jeopardy, as she now is, it is
not the time to tarnish great reputations, to asperse the dead, and to
discover our supposed weaknesses to the enemy; so I shall not discuss
the Dardanelles Reports--I shall await the end of the war, when all the
truth can be made known.”




CHAPTER VII

THE ESSENTIALS OF SEA FIGHTING


Sir William Allan, M.P., with the torso of a Hercules and the voice
of a bull and the affectionate heart of Mary Magdalene, did not know
Latin, and he asked me what my motto meant:

                      “Fiat justitia--ruat cœlum.”

I had sent it to him when he was malignantly attacking me because, as
Controller of the Navy, I had introduced the water-tube boiler. Sir
William Allan was himself a boiler-maker, and he had to scrap most of
his plant because of this new type of boiler.

I said the translation was: “Do right, and damn the odds.”

This motto has stood me in good stead, for by attending to it I fought
a great battle in a righteous cause with Lord Salisbury, when he was
Prime Minister, and conquered. I have related this elsewhere. Years
after, Lord Salisbury, in remembrance of this, recalled me from being
Commander-in-Chief in America to be British delegate at the First
Peace Conference at The Hague in 1899, and from thence I went as
Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet.

While I was in command of the Mediterranean Fleet, from 1899 to
1902, when I became Second Sea Lord of the Admiralty, I arranged to
have lectures for the officers of the Fleet. I extract now from the
notes of my lectures some points which may be of general interest, as
illustrating the new strategy and tactics necessitated by the change
from wind to steam.

After setting forth a few of the problems which would have to be
solved in sea-fighting under the new conditions, the lecturer went on
to elaborate the themes from such rough notes as I give here of the
principal ideas.

    All Officers without exception should be unceasingly occupied
    in considering the various solutions of these problems, as who
    can tell who will be in command after the first five minutes of
    a close engagement, whether in an individual ship or in command
    of the whole Fleet! Otherwise we may have a stampede like
    that of riderless horses! The Captain or Admiral is _hors de
    combat_, and the next Officer, and, perhaps, the next, and the
    next don’t know what to do when moments mean victory or defeat!

    “The man who hesitates is lost!” and so it will be with the
    Fleet if decision is wanting!

    “Time, Twiss, time is everything!” said Nelson (speaking to
    General Twiss when he was chasing the French Fleet under
    Villeneuve to the West Indies); “a quarter of an hour may mean
    the difference between Victory and Defeat!”

    This was in sailing days. Now it will be quarters of a minute,
    not quarters of an hour!

    It is said to have been stated by one of the most eminent of
    living men, that sudden war becomes daily more probable because
    public opinion is becoming greater in power, and that popular
    emotion, once fairly aroused, sweeps away the barriers of calm
    deliberation, and is deaf to the voice of reason.

    Besides cultivating the faculty of Quick Decision and
    consequent rapid action, we must cultivate Rashness.

    Napoleon was asked the secret of victory. He replied,
    “_L’audace, l’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace!_”

    There is a rashness which in Peace is Folly, but which in War
    is Prudence, and there are risks that must be undertaken in War
    which are Obligatory, but which in peace would be Criminal!

    As in War, so in the preparation for War, Rashness must have
    its place. We must also reflect how apt we are to suppose that
    the enemy will fit himself into our plans!

    The first successful blow on either side will probably
    determine the final issue in sea-fighting. Sustained physical
    energy will be the required great attribute at that time
    for those in command as well as those who administer.
    Collingwood wrote two years before Trafalgar, when blockading
    Rochefort--and Nelson then off Toulon, Pellew off Ferrol,
    and Cornwallis off Brest--that “_Admirals needed to be made
    of iron!_” The pressure then will test the endurance of the
    strongest, and the rank of Admiral confers no immunity from the
    operation of the natural law of _Anno Domini_! Nelson was 39
    years old at the Battle of the Nile, and died at 47. What is
    our average age of those actively responsible for the control,
    mobilisation, and command of our Fleets? As age increases,
    audacity leaks out and caution comes in.

    An instant offensive is obligatory. Mahan truly says:--

    “The assumption of a simple defensive in war is ruin. War, once
    declared, must be waged offensively, aggressively. The enemy
    must not be fended off, but smitten down. You may then spare
    him every exaction, relinquish every gain. But till down he
    must be struck incessantly and remorselessly.”[1]

    All will depend on the instant start, the sudden blow! Napoleon
    again, “_Frappez vite et frappez fort!_” That was the whole of
    his orders.

    The question of armament is all-important!

    If we have the advantage of speed, _which is the first
    desideratum in every class of fighting vessel_ (_Battleships
    included_), _then, and then only_, we can choose our distance
    for fighting. If we can choose our distance for fighting, then
    we can choose our armament for fighting! But how in the past
    has the armament been chosen? Do we arrange the armament to
    meet the proposed mode of fighting? Doesn’t it sometimes look
    like so many of each sort, as if you were peopling the Ark, and
    wanted representatives of all calibres?

    _Whoever hits soonest and oftenest will win!_

    “The effectiveness of a fighting weapon,” wrote Mahan,
    “consists more in the method of its use and in the practised
    skill of the human element that wields it than in the material
    perfection of the weapon itself. The sequel of a long period of
    peace is a demoralisation of ideals. Those who rise in peace
    are men of formality and routine, cautious, inoffensive, safe
    up to the limits of their capacity, supremely conscientious,
    punctilious about everything but what is essential, yet void
    altogether of initiative, impulse and originality.

    “This was the difference between Hawke and Matthews. Hawke
    represented the spirit of war, the ardour, the swift
    initiative, the readiness of resource, the impatience of
    prescription and routine, without which no great things are
    done! Matthews, the spirit of peace, the very reverse of all
    this!”

    Peace brings with it the reign of old men.

    The sacred fire never burnt in Collingwood. Nelson, with the
    instinct of genius, intended the Fleet to anchor, turning
    the very dangers of the shoals of Trafalgar into a security.
    Collingwood, simply a naval machine, and never having been his
    own master all his life, and not being a genius, thought a
    shoal was a thing to be avoided, and, consequently, wrecked the
    ships unfitted to cope with a gale, and so to weather these
    shoals! Collingwood ought to have had the moon given him for
    his crest, for all his glory was reflected from Nelson, the sun
    of glory! Collingwood was an old woman!

    History is a record of exploded ideas. In what sense? Fighting
    conditions are all altered. The wind formerly determined the
    course of action; now it is only the mind of man. One man and
    the best man is wanted--not a fossil; not a careful man. Fleets
    were formerly days coming into action, now only minutes.

    Two Fleets can now be fighting each other in twenty minutes
    from first seeing each other’s smoke.

    Formerly sea battles were Sailors’ battles, now they are
    Officers’.

    At Trafalgar, Nelson was walking up and down the Quarter-Deck
    and having a yarn with his Flag Captain, Hardy, at the very
    zenith of the Action! It was the common sailors only who were
    then at work. How different now! _The Admiral everything!_

    Now, the different phases of a Naval War are as capable of as
    exact a demonstration as a proposition in Euclid, because steam
    has annihilated wind and sea. We are now trained to a higher
    standard, and the arts of strategy and tactics have accordingly
    been immensely magnified. Make an initial mistake in strategy
    or tactics, and then it may be said of them as of women by
    Congreve:

  “Hell has no fury like a woman scorn’d.”

    The last place to defend England will be the Shores of England.

    The Frontiers of England are the Coasts of the Enemy. We ought
    to be there five minutes before war breaks out.

    Naval Supremacy once destroyed is destroyed for ever. Carthage,
    Spain, Holland, the great commercial nations of the past, had
    the sea wrested from them, and then they fell.

    A successful Mercantile Marine leads to a successful War Navy.

    It is solely owing to our command of the sea that we have been
    able to build up our magnificent Empire.

    Admiral Mahan’s most famous passage is:--

    “The world has never seen a more impressive demonstration of
    the influence of Sea Power upon its history. Those far-distant,
    storm-beaten ships of Nelson, upon which the Grand Army never
    looked, stood between it and the dominion of the World.”


    “SECRECY AND SECRETIVENESS.”

    There are three types of Secrecy:--

  I. The Ostrich.
  II. The Red Box.
  III. The Real Thing.

    I. The ostrich buries his head in the sand of the desert when
    pursued by his enemy, and because he can’t see the enemy
    concludes the enemy can’t see him! Such is the secrecy of
    the secretive and detestable habit which hides from our own
    officers what is known to the world in other Navies.

    II. The secrecy of the Red Box is that of a distinguished
    Admiral who, with great pomp, used to have his red despatch box
    carried before him (like the umbrella of an African King), as
    containing the most secret plans; but one day, the box being
    unfortunately capsized and burst open, the only contents that
    fell out were copies of “La Vie Parisienne”!

    Such, it is feared, was the secrecy of those wonderful detailed
    plans for war we hear of in the past as having been secreted in
    secret drawers, to be brought out “when the time comes,” and
    when no one has any time to study them, supposing, that is,
    they ever existed; and, remember, it is detailed attention to
    minutiæ and the consideration of trifles which spells success.

    III. There is the legitimate secrecy and secretiveness of
    hiding from your dearest friend the moment and the nature
    of your rush at the enemy, and which of all the variety of
    _operations you have previously practised with the Fleet_ you
    will bring into play! But all your Captains will instantly know
    your mind and intentions, for you will hoist the signal or
    spark the wireless message, Plan A, or Plan B ..., or Plan Z!

    “After I have made known my intentions,” began Nelson’s
    last order; and it expressed the experience of a hundred
    battles--that the Second in Command (and in these days it may
    well be amplified into the individual officers in command) are
    to fulfil the spirit of the peace manœuvre teaching, and assist
    by the teaching in carrying out the meaning of brief signals
    to the destruction of the enemy’s Fleet. The secret of success
    lies in the first part of the sentence: “_After I have made
    known my intentions._”

    Confidence is a plant of slow growth. Long and constant
    association of ships of a Fleet is essential to success. A
    new-comer is often more dangerous than the enemy.

    An Army may be improvised in case of war, but not a Navy.

    Immense importance of constant readiness at all times. A Fleet
    always ready to go to sea at an hour’s notice is a splendid
    national life preserver! Here comes in the water-tube boiler!
    Without previous notice or even an inkling, we have been ready
    to start in one hour with water-tube boiler ships. You can’t
    exaggerate this! One bucket of water ready on the spot in the
    shape of an instantly ready Fleet will stop the conflagration
    of war which all the Fire Brigades of the world won’t stop
    a little later on! Never forget that from the very nature
    of sea fighting an initial Naval disaster is irretrievable,
    irreparable, eternal. Naval Colensos have no Paardebergs!

    _Suddenness_ is the secret of success at sea, because
    suddenness is practicable, and remember that rashness may be
    the height of prudence. How very rash Nelson was at the Nile to
    go in after dark to fight the French Fleet with no chart of the
    shoals of Aboukir!

    But you must be sure of your Fleet and they must be sure of
    you! Every detail previously thought out. Trust no one! (My
    friend, Maurice Bourke, used to tell a story of the Yankee
    barber, who put up in his shop: “To trust is to bust, and to
    bust is hell!” which means “no credit given”). Make the very
    best of things as they are. Criminal to wait for something
    better. “We strain at the gnat of perfection and swallow the
    camel of unreadiness.”


    “THE GREAT SILENT NAVY.”

    The usual motto is “Silence” or “Deeds, not words,” which
    you will see ornamenting some conspicuous place in a
    ship.[2] It has been said by landsmen that the most striking
    feature to them in a British man-of-war when at sea is the
    noiseless, ceaseless, sleepless, yet unobtrusive, energy that
    characterises everyone and everything on board! If so, we
    sailors don’t notice it, and it is the result of nature! Gales
    of wind, sudden fogs, immense speeds, the much multiplied
    dangers of collision and wreck from these terrific speeds, as
    in Destroyers and even in large ships, all these circumstances
    automatically react on all on board and are nature’s education
    by environment. There is no place for the unthinking or the
    lethargic. He is a positive danger! Every individual in a
    man-of-war has his work cut out! “Think and act for yourself”
    is to be the motto of the future, not “Let us wait for orders!”

    Such may be said of sea fights! No mountains delay us, and,
    as Scripture says, the way of a ship is trackless! The enemy
    will suddenly confront us as an Apparition! At every moment
    we must be ready! Can this be acquired by grown men? No! it
    is the force of habit. You must commence early. Our Nelsons
    and Benbows began the sea life when they first put their
    breeches on! The brother of the Black Prince (John of Gaunt)
    joined the Navy and was in a sea fight when he was 10 years of
    age! Far exceeding anything known in history does our future
    Trafalgar depend on promptitude and rapid decision, and on
    every eventuality having been foreseen by those in command. But
    these attributes cannot be acquired late in life, nor by those
    who have lived the life of cabbages! So begin early and work
    continuously. Then if there is war your opportunity must come!
    Like Kitchener, you will then walk over the cabbages!

[Illustration: A GROUP AT LANGHAM HOUSE. PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN AND SENT TO
SIR JOHN FISHER BY THE EMPRESS MARIE OF RUSSIA.

  1. Mrs. Neeld.
  2. Miss Diana Neeld.
  3. The Princess Victoria.
  4. Lady Fisher.
  5. Queen Alexandra.
  6. Miss Kitty Fullerton.
  7. Sir John Fisher.
]




CHAPTER VIII

JONAH’S GOURD

    “Came up in a night
    And perished in a night.”

    JONAH, chap. iv, verse 10.


The above words came into my mind late last night when tired out with
destroying masses of papers and letters (mostly malignant abuse or the
emanations of senile dotage), I sat back in my chair and soliloquised
over what had happened to all these pestilent attackers of mine; and
I said to myself in those immortal words in Jonah, “_Doest thou well
to be angry?_” and for a few brief moments I really quite felt like
Stephen praying for his enemies when they stoned him! What has become
of all these stone-throwers and backbiters, I asked myself! Like
Jonah’s Gourd--“A worm has smote them all”--and they have withered into
obscurity. But yet it’s interesting, as this is a Book of Records,
to tear out one sheet or so and reproduce here some replies to the
nefarious nonsense one had to deal with at that time of democratising
the Navy. I reprint verbatim a few pages I wrote in October, 1906.
These particular words that follow here were directed against those
who assailed my principles of (1) The fighting efficiency of the Fleet,
(2) Its instant readiness for war.


ADMIRALTY POLICY: REPLIES TO CRITICISMS.

    [In the autumn of 1906 there was considerable criticism of
    the Government’s naval policy, particularly in the daily and
    weekly Press. Just before the dissolution of Mr. Balfour’s
    administration, Lord Cawdor, then First Lord, had issued a
    memorandum on “Admiralty Work and Progress,” dated November
    30th, 1905, in which it was stated that “At the present time
    strategic requirements necessitate an output of four large
    armoured ships annually.” In July, 1906, however, it was
    announced in Parliament that only three battleships would
    be included in the current programme, the reason for the
    abandonment of the fourth ship being that there was a temporary
    cessation of warship building on the Continent caused by the
    advent of the “Dreadnought” and the “Invincibles.” Coming in
    the first year of office of the new Liberal administration,
    however, the reduction in the British programme aroused genuine
    disquiet among certain people, and by others was utilised
    for a political attack on the Government, who were alleged
    to be jeopardising the security of the country. In addition,
    there was another body of opinion strongly adverse to certain
    features in the design of the new “Dreadnoughts.” The following
    notes were prepared by Lord Fisher at the time for use by
    Lord Tweedmouth and Mr. Edmund Robertson (afterwards Lord
    Lochee), who were then First Lord and Parliamentary Secretary
    respectively.]

The most brilliant preacher of our generation has said what a stimulus
it is to have always some friends to save us from that “Woe unto you
when all men shall speak well of you”! When criticism goes, life is
done! You must squeeze the fragrant leaf to get the delicious scent!
Hence, it may be truly said that the Board of Admiralty should just
now heartily shake hands with themselves, because Korah, Dathan, and
Abiram (in the shape of three Retrograde Don Quixotes) are trying to
raise a rebellion, but the earth will now open and swallow them all up
quick as in the days of Moses. They and all their company, with their
small battleships and their slow speeds, and their invasion fright
and foreign shipbuilding houses of cards are each and all capable of
absolute pulverisation! Why people don’t laugh at it all is the wonder!
Here, for instance, is a military correspondent lecturing the Board of
Admiralty on types of ships; and Admirals, whose names were bywords of
inefficiency and ineptitude when they were afloat, and who never--one
single one of them--left anything better than they found it, are being
seriously quoted by serious magazines and serious newspapers as “a most
distinguished Admiral,” etc., etc. “These prophets prophesy falsely and
the people love to have it so,” as Jeremiah says! This is because of
the inherent pessimistic British instinct!

Perhaps the most laughable and silly emanation of these Rip Van Winkles
is the outcry against large ships and high speeds, and an Admiral has
gone so far as to resort to mathematics and trigonometrical absurdities
to prove that slow speed and 6-inch guns are of primary importance
in a sea fight!!! Archbishop Whately dealt with a similar critic
by a celebrated _jeu d’esprit_ entitled “Historic Doubts relative
to Napoleon Buonaparte.” The Archbishop by a process of fallacious
reasoning demonstrated with all the exactitude of a mathematical
problem the impossibility of the existence of such a person as
Buonaparte! But as someone has well said, if these strange oddities can
convert our enemies (the Germans) to the priceless advantage of slow
ships and small guns they are patriots in disguise, and Providence is
employing them (as it employs worms and other such things) in assisting
to work out the unfailing and invincible supremacy of the British Navy.

But to say no more--the plain man sees that it is of vital importance
that we should obtain the highest possible speed in order that, in face
of emergencies on the south or east or west of the British Isles, we
may be able to concentrate adequate Naval Force with as little delay
as possible, and that had the British Admiralty held the opinions
expressed by “the Blackwood Balaam” our battleships would still be
steaming at about 10 knots an hour, because he must remember that the
progress which has been made from 10 knots to 22 knots (as attained in
“Dreadnought” at deep, or war load draught) has been gradual, and at
any period during this progression it was quite open to other Balaams
to retard the action of the Admiralty by pointing out that the slight
gain in speed which has been chronicled year by year in battleships was
really not worth the price which was being paid for it! But, Blessed
be God! In this and all other criticisms of Admiralty Policy the
public pulse is totally unaffected, and the reputation of the Admiralty
unlowered.

For 12 months past not a single battleship has been laid down in
Europe, and this simply and solely owing to the dramatic appearance
of the “Dreadnought,” which upset all the calculations in Foreign
Admiralties and deserved the calculated letter written by Lord Selborne
to the Committee on Designs. The Admiralty has done more than all the
Peace party with all their dinners to arrest the contest for Sea Power!

In the criticisms we are dealing with, “Party” as usual has come before
“Patriotism,” but the Sea Lords can, each one of them, confidently say,
with the poet’s version of a patriot’s motto,

    “Sworn to no party, of no sect am I,
    I can’t be silent and I will not lie,”

and so the Sea Lords have no desire to avoid any odium the Tory
papers[3] may be pleased to bring upon them. There is undoubted
authority for stating that a skilfully organised “Fleet Street”
conspiracy aided by Naval Malcontents is endeavouring to excite the
British public against the Board of Admiralty, but it has fallen flat.

There is, however, a very serious danger in the propagation of the
view so ably combated by Sir C. Dilke in his speech at Coleford, Forest
of Dean, on September 27th last, that this country requires a military
force of 640,000 men!

His comparison of Navy and Army expenditure is illuminating but has
been totally ignored by the Press and the country. The “Fiery Cross”
has been sent round to resuscitate the “Invasion Bogey.”

There has been for many years past a general feeling in this country
that questions of international relationship and of national defence
should be withdrawn as far as possible from the arena of party
politics. Such divergences of opinion as must exist on these topics
have no obvious connection with the divisions of our internal politics;
and it is surely legitimate to go further than this, and say that the
main problems in these departments can be dealt with in such a way as
to win the assent of every reasonable man, whatever his opinions may be
on Trade Unionism or Elementary Education.

At any rate successive Boards of Admiralty have for something like 20
years acted on the assumption--which has hitherto been justified--that
their policy would be accepted by the public as based on a fully
considered estimate of the requirements of national defence, and, if
criticised (as it was bound to be from time to time), criticised on
other than partisan grounds. Between the date of the Naval Defence Act
and 1904 the Navy Estimates were approximately trebled. The increase
was continuous under four successive First Lords, and under both
Liberal and Conservative Governments. In 1904 the maximum of the curve
of expenditure was reached, and the Navy Estimates began to decline,
at first rapidly, under a Conservative Government, then more slowly,
and in part subject to certain provisos, under the present Liberal
Government. And this, it appears, is the moment chosen for the first
considerable outbreak of political rancour in naval affairs since the
modern Navy came into existence!

It is, however, of such supreme importance to the Navy that the
Admiralty Board should not be suspected of being governed in its
decisions on matters of national defence by partisan considerations
that it may be well to set out again, and very explicitly, what are the
reasons which have led the Board to adopt the policy now impugned.

Here we have to go back to first principles. It has become too much
the fashion to employ the phrase “a two-Power standard” as a mere
shibboleth. The principle this phrase embodies has been of the utmost
value in the past, and is likely to be so in the future; but if used
unintelligently at the present moment it merely gives the enemy cause
to blaspheme. Great Britain must, it is agreed, maintain at all costs
the command of the sea. Therefore we must be decisively stronger than
any possible enemy. Who then is the possible enemy? Ten years ago,
or even less, we should probably have answered, France and Russia in
alliance. As they were then respectively the second and third naval
Powers, the two-Power standard had an actuality which it has since
lost. The United States and Germany are competing for the second place
which France has already almost yielded. Russia’s fleet has practically
disappeared. Japan’s has sprung to the front rank. Of the four Powers
which are primarily in question, Japan is our ally, France is our
close friend, America is a kindred State with whom we may indeed have
evanescent quarrels, but with whom, it is scarcely too much to say, we
shall never have a parricidal war. The other considerable naval Powers
are Italy and Austria, of whom we are the secular friends, and whose
treaty obligations are in the highest degree unlikely to force them
into a rupture with us which could in no possible way serve their own
interests.

There remains Germany. Undoubtedly she is a possible enemy.[4] While
there is no specific cause of dispute there is a general commercial
and--on the German side--political rivalry which has unfortunately
but indisputably caused bad blood between the two countries. For the
moment, it would be safe to build against Germany only. But we cannot
build for the moment: the Board of Admiralty are the trustees of
future generations of their countrymen, who may not enjoy the same
comparatively serene sky as ourselves. The ships we lay down this
year may have their influence on the international situation twenty
years hence, when Germany--or whoever our most likely antagonist may
then be--may have the opportunity of the co-operation (even if only
temporary) of another great naval Power. Hence a two-Power standard,
rationally interpreted, is by no means out of date. But it is not
a rational interpretation to say that we must instantly lay down as
many ships as any other two Powers are at this moment laying down. We
must take long views; we must be sure what other Powers are doing; we
must take the average of their efforts, and average our own efforts in
response.

Now this matter of averaging the shipbuilding, of equalising the
programme over a number of years, deserves further consideration. Some
Powers, notably Germany, attempt to achieve this end by creating long
statutory programmes. The British Admiralty has abandoned the idea
since the Naval Defence Act. For us, in fact, it would be a thoroughly
vicious system. For a Power which is trying to “set the pace,” and
which is glad to avoid annual discussion of the financial aspect of
the question, it, no doubt, has its advantages. But Great Britain does
not build to a naval strength that can be determined _a priori_; she
builds simply and solely to maintain the command of the sea against
other Powers. For this end the Admiralty must have its hands free to
determine from year to year what the shipbuilding requirements are.
But, again, this does not mean that our efforts must be spasmodic, that
because foreign Powers lay down six ships one year and none the next,
therefore we must do the same. For administrative reasons, which should
be obvious, and which in any case this is not the place to dilate upon,
it is very necessary that shipbuilding should approximate year by year,
so far as practicable, to some normal figure, and that increases or
decreases, when they become necessary, should be made gradually. This
double principle, of determining the programme from year to year, and
yet averaging the number of ships built over a number of years, has to
be firmly grasped by anyone who desires to understand the Admiralty
shipbuilding policy.

With this preamble we are in a position to discuss the actual
situation. And first we have to consider what is the existing relative
strength of Great Britain and the other naval Powers. About this
there is really no difference of opinion--British naval supremacy was
never better assured than at the present moment. Even admitting the
combination of two of the three next naval Powers (France, Germany,
and the United States) to be conceivable, it is certain that any two
of them would hesitate to attack us, and it is more than probable
that if they did they would be defeated, even without the assistance
of our Japanese allies. The alleged alarm as to our naval strength
is therefore admittedly in regard to the future, not in regard to
the present. And here (to digress for a moment) we may remark that
agitations have occurred in earlier years when it was supposed that
some foreign Power or combination of Powers was actually in a position
to sweep us off the Channel, but never before have we been invited to
panic by prophecy. Is there not something slightly absurd in alarm--not
calculation, for that is justifiable enough, but alarm--about our
position in 1920? At any rate, it is clear that it is the future which
we are called on to consider.

In this connection two facts have to be remembered: first, that we
start in a position of security, and need therefore be in no undue
haste to build more ships; _secondly, that we are on the threshold of
a new era in naval construction_, and can therefore not rest content
with the advantage which we secured in an era which is passing away.
The problem need not be complicated by a somewhat futile attempt to
bring the existing and the new ships of our own and foreign navies to a
common denominator; we must build new ships to meet new ships, always,
however, remembering that until the new ships are in commission we have
got plenty of the old ones to fight with.

But here it is really impossible to avoid commenting on the gross
insincerity of some recent attacks on the Admiralty. It was no doubt
only to be expected that the four ships of the Cawdor memorandum,
which were explicitly stated to be a maximum, should always be quoted
as a minimum by anyone who wishes to belabour the present Board.
But there is a further point which the convenient shortness of the
journalistic memory has suffered to be overlooked. When the Cawdor
memorandum was issued, it was generally (though wrongly) assumed that
only two of the four ships would be battleships, and two “armoured
cruisers.” _And at that time the public had certainly no idea what the_
“_Invincible_” Fast Battle Cruiser type was like, with its 6 knots
superiority of speed to everything afloat, and the biggest guns alive.
The “Invincibles” are, as a matter of fact, perfectly fit to be in line
of battle with the battle fleet, and _could more correctly be described
as battleships which, thanks to their speed, can drive anything afloat
off the seas_. But this was not known, and the calculations generally
made in the Press added only two units per annum to our battle fleet.
Yet there was no outcry; that was reserved to a later date, when it was
beginning to be understood that the “Invincibles” could be reckoned
side by side with the “Dreadnought,” and it had been announced that
three new “Dreadnoughts,” instead of two, were to be laid down this
winter. Surely the ways of the party journalist are past finding out.

In this connection it may be well also to make some observations
on the diminution by the authority of the Board of programmes of
shipbuilding already approved by Parliament. The allegation that
there is anything unconstitutional in the procedure may be left to
the constitutional lawyer to pulverise. Probably all that is usually
meant by the statement is that it is desirable to let Parliament know
of the change in the programme as soon as convenient after it has been
decided, and to this there would usually be no possible objection.
But the idea that, because Parliament has voted a certain sum of
money for the current year’s programme, and certain commitments for
future years (a much more important matter), therefore the Board is
bound to build ships it really does not want, is not only pernicious,
but also ridiculous in the extreme. The only legitimate ground for
complaint, if any, would be that the Board had misled Parliament in
the first instance by overestimating the requirements. The Board are
faced each summer with the necessity of saying what they expect
to have to lay down 18 months later. This, of course, is prophecy.
Generally it is found to be pretty accurate, but the advent of the
new era in shipbuilding (which is principally due to the lessons of
the only big naval war of modern times) has made prophecy more than
usually difficult. Moreover, if the matter is at all in doubt, the
prophet has special inducements to select the higher rather than the
lower figure. Increase of a programme during a given year will involve
a supplementary estimate with all its accompanying inconveniences.
If on the other hand it is found that the original programme was
unnecessarily extensive, it is a comparatively simple matter to cut it
down. It is best of course to have the right number of new ships in the
Navy Estimates; but it is next best to have a number in excess of that
ultimately required, which can be pruned as requisite.

Let us repeat: sufficient unto the year is the shipbuilding thereof.
Panic at the present time is stupid. The Board of Admiralty is not to
be frightened by paper programmes. They will cautiously do all that
they judge necessary to secure the existing naval supremacy of this
country: the moment that is threatened they will throw caution to the
winds and outbuild our rivals at all costs.


H.M. SHIPS “DREADNOUGHT” AND “INVINCIBLE.”

The accompanying papers[5] contain arguments in support of the
“Dreadnought” and “Invincible.”

The features of these novel designs, which have been most adversely
criticised, are:--

  1. The uniform Big Gun armament.
  2. The great increase in speed.

It is admitted that strategically speed is of very great importance.
It enables the fleet or fleets possessing it to concentrate at any
desired spot as quickly as possible, and it must therefore exercise an
important influence on the course of a naval war, rapid concentration
being one of the chief factors of success.

Many adverse critics of high speed maintain that it is the weapon
of the weaker Fleet, the only advantage conferred being the ability
to refuse an action by running away: two cases may be cited from
the actions of the late war in the East showing the fallacy of this
argument and that the Japanese successes were solely due to a command
of speed.

In the battle of the 10th August, 1904, after the preliminary
manœuvres, the Russian Admiral turned to the eastward at 2.30 p.m. to
escape to Vladivostok. The Japanese Fleet was then on the starboard
quarter of the Russian and practically out of range. Captain Pakenham,
the British Naval Attaché, who was on board Admiral Togo’s flagship, in
his report, states that the “‘Tzæsarevitch’ (leading the Russian line)
was almost out of sight.” A slightly superior speed in the Russian line
would have ensured their escape, but the excess of speed lay with the
Japanese and they slowly drew up into range and reopened the action;
but it was late in the evening before they drew far enough ahead to
concentrate a heavy fire on the leader of the Russian line and so
break up their formation. When this was accomplished it was nearly
dark and the Russians, though thrown into confusion and beaten, were
not destroyed, for the approaching darkness and the destroyer threat
necessitated the Japanese Battle Fleet hauling off, yet the retreat to
Vladivostok was prevented.

A higher speed in the Japanese line would have wrought confusion to the
Russians earlier in the day, and probably have allowed a sufficient
period of daylight for their total destruction.

Again. At the opening of the Battle of the Sea of Japan in May, the
Japanese Fleet, due to skilful handling, held a commanding position,
giving a concentration of fire on the heads of the Russian lines. Had
they not possessed superior speed, the Japanese would rapidly have lost
this advantage, as the Russians turned away to starboard and compelled
the Japanese to move along a circle of larger radius; their greater
speed enabled the Japanese to maintain their advantage and so continue
the concentration of fire on the Russian van until so much damage had
been inflicted that the Russians lost all order and were crushed.

These, therefore, are two of the most convincing instances that
could now be given, where speed was of overwhelming tactical value
to the victorious side, and such evidence is unanswerable and is a
justification of the speeds adopted in the designs of the new ships.


DEFECTS AND REPAIRS

    [Lord Fisher found fruitful scope for his reforming energy in
    the Royal dockyards, and was very keen on making them efficient
    in working as well as economical in administration. The former
    tendency had been for ships to accumulate defects until they
    went into dock, when their stay was accordingly prolonged,
    and the longer they were in dockyard hands the more work was
    provided for the officials and workmen, so that there was a
    double incentive to spend money. In the following memorandum,
    Lord Fisher insists that this drain upon the limited funds
    available for the Navy must stop, and explains how the
    Admiralty meant to discriminate between vessels which it was
    essential to keep thoroughly efficient and others which were
    not worth any, or so much, money for repairs. Elsewhere in this
    volume Lord Fisher has shown how he got rid of 6,000 redundant
    dockyard workmen.]

The head has got to wag the tail. The tail sometimes now wags the head.
It is for the Admiralty, and the Admiralty alone, to decide _whether_,
_how_, or _when_ the defects and repairs of the Fleet are to be taken
in hand.

[Illustration: SIR JOHN FISHER GOING ON BOARD THE ROYAL YACHT.]

_The sole governing condition is what the Admiralty require for
fighting purposes!_ It is desirable to put an extreme case to
accentuate this:--

In the secrets of Admiralty Fighting Policy undesirable to make known
to our enemies there are certain vessels never going to be used for
actual fighting, but they serve an extremely useful purpose for
subsidiary purposes. In such vessels there are defects and repairs of
a particular character that might stand over till Doomsday! whilst
there are other vessels where only defects affecting purely seagoing
and actually direct fighting efficiency should be attended to. All
this entirely depends on our probable enemy and may vary from time
to time, and the sole judge can only be the Admiralty. But what it
is feared now obtains is a blind rushing at all defects and repairs
of all kinds and classes in all vessels. It is perfectly natural
that the Commander-in-Chief and Admirals Superintendent may wish for
the millennium of having all their vessels perfect--but this cannot
be. What does it lead to? Extreme local pressure accentuated by
Parliamentary action to enter more Dockyard workmen. What does this
mean? It means in some recent cases that practically the upkeep of
three cruisers is swallowed up in pay to Dockyard workmen! No--the
Admiralty Policy is sound, consistent and irrefutable, which is _never_
to exceed the normal number of Dockyard workmen as now fixed by the
recent Committee, and have such a great margin of Naval strength--such
as we now possess--as admits of a leisurely and economical refit of
ships without extravagant overtime or inefficient hustling of work.
Therefore, what it comes to is this:--The Admiralty decide what vessels
they require first and what defects and repairs in those vessels are
most material, and they give orders accordingly. It is _not_ the
responsibility of the local authorities at all to say that this vessel
or that vessel must be completed at once, for, as before-mentioned, it
may be that in the Admiralty scheme of fighting those vessels are not
required at all.

The Controller has great difficulties to contend with because he has
not the free hand of a private employer who can discharge or enter
men just as he requires. To get rid of a Dockyard workman involves
agitation in every direction--in Parliament, at the Treasury and
locally, and even Bishops throw themselves into the fray, like the
Bishop of Winchester at Portsmouth, instead of looking after his own
disorganised and mutinous Established Church. There is now a plethora
of shipwrights at Chatham, because the Treasury will not allow their
transfer to other yards, and a paucity of boilermakers because unwanted
men occupy their places, and the scandal exists of men being entered at
Devonport with men having no work at Chatham. But, of course, this is
one of the blessings of Parliamentary Government, Treasury Control, and
a Free Press!

Where the special influence of the Commander-in-Chief is desired by
the Admiralty is to bring before them cases where defects have not
been dealt with in the initial stages by the ship’s artificers and so
allowed to increase as to necessitate Dockyard intervention. Such cases
would be drastically dealt with by the Admiralty if only they could
be informed of them, but there is an amiable desire to avoid severe
punishments, and the dire result is that the zealous and efficient are
on the same footing as the incompetent and the careless who get more
leave and time with their friends because their vessels are longer in
Dockyard hands.

It is desired to give prominence to the following facts:--It is a
matter of everyday occurrence that vessels come home from Foreign
stations, often immense distances, as from China or Australia, and
are inspected by the Commander-in-Chief on arrival home and reported
thoroughly efficient, and praise is given by the Admiralty accordingly,
and the full-power steam trial is conducted with great care, and the
mere fact of the vessel having steamed home those thousands of miles is
itself a manifest evidence of her propelling machinery being efficient,
and yet instantly after paying off we are asked to believe that such a
vessel instantly drops down to a totally incapable condition of either
seagoing or fighting efficiency, by our being presented with a bill of
thousands upon thousands of pounds.

The attention of the Commanders-in-Chief of the Home Ports and of
the Admirals Superintendent will be specially drawn to a new series
of instructions which will specifically detail their responsibility
in carrying out the orders of the Admiralty in regard to defects and
repairs. It is admitted that no comprehensive statement has as yet been
issued as to the order and urgency in which both Fleet and Dockyard
labour should be applied.

This statement is now about to be issued--it is based, and can only be
based, on the knowledge of what vessels are most required for war at
that particular time, and so must emanate direct from the Admiralty,
who alone can decide on this matter. For instance, at this present
moment there are vessels, even in the first line as some might suppose,
which would not be employed until the last resort, whilst there are
others almost believed to be out of the fighting category which under
certain present conditions might be required for the first blow.
This fact came so notably into prominence some months since that it
has led to the adoption of what may be termed the “sliding scale”
of nucleus crews, with the Torpedo craft and Submarines at almost
full complement down to the vessels in “Special Reserve” with only a
“skeleton” crew capable of raising steam periodically and working only
the heavy armament. So no local knowledge could determine from day to
day which are the first vessels required. This is changing from day to
day and it is the duty of the necessarily _very few_ to determine the
daily fighting requirements. The ideal is for only _one_ to know, and
the nearer this is adhered to the more likely are we to surprise our
enemies.


THE USE OF THE GUNBOAT.

    [The notes and letters which follow were prepared by
    Lord Fisher in the course of his advocacy that the Navy
    Estimates and the Service itself should not be saddled with
    establishments not directly contributing to the fighting
    efficiency of the Fleet and its instant readiness for war.
    Such services, he maintained, not only reduced the sum of
    money available for the real work of the Navy, but constituted
    elements of weakness in the event of hostilities. The first
    document concerns the maintenance of small craft on foreign
    stations, on which a number of “gunboats” were kept to fulfil
    duties for departments other than the Admiralty. Lord Fisher
    differentiates between vessels which the Board should rightly
    supply, and others which had no naval value but were retained
    for duties connected with the Foreign or Colonial Offices--for
    which, if necessary, a proper fighting ship could be lent
    temporarily and then returned to her squadron. The second
    document deals with the Coastguard, which no longer served the
    purpose of a reserve for the Navy, and which had come to be
    mainly employed on duties connected with revenue, life-saving,
    etc., although paid for out of Navy Votes and employing Navy
    personnel. Thirdly, the Admiralty letter on Observatories shows
    that heavy expense was borne upon naval funds for duties no
    longer necessary to the Royal Navy.]

In the Cawdor memorandum of last year (1905) will be found an
exposition of the Admiralty policy in this matter, and attention may
particularly be drawn to the following passage:--

“Gunboats, and all vessels of like class, have been gradually losing
value except for definite purposes under special conditions. As far
as this country is concerned, the very places consecrated as the
sphere of gunboat activity are those remote from the covering aid of
large ships. Strained relations may occur at the shortest notice; the
false security of the period of drifting imperceptibly into actual
hostilities is proverbial, and the nervous dread of taking any action
that might even be construed into mere precautionary measures of
defence, which experience has shown to be one of the peculiar symptoms
of such a period, is apt to deprive these small vessels of their last
remaining chance of security by not allowing them to fall back towards
material support. The broadcast use of gunboats in peace time is a
marked strategic weakness, and larger vessels can generally do the work
equally well, in fact far better, for they really possess the strength
necessary to uphold the prestige of the flag they fly, whereas the
gunboat is merely an abstract symbol of the power of the nation, not a
concrete embodiment of it.

“It might be thought that the withdrawal of the small non-effective
vessels and the grouping of fleets and squadrons at the strategic
positions for war involved the loss of British prestige, and of the
‘Showing the Flag’ (as it was termed). But the actual fact is that
never before in naval history has there been a more universal display
of sea power than during this year by this country. The Channel Fleet
in the North Sea and Baltic receiving the courtesies of Holland,
Denmark, and Germany; the Atlantic Fleet at Brest; the Mediterranean
Fleet at Algiers; the Fourth Cruiser Squadron, consisting of five
powerful fighting vessels, now in the West Atlantic; a powerful
squadron of six of the finest armoured cruisers in the world visiting
Lisbon, Canada, Newfoundland, and United States; a squadron of
cruisers, under a Commodore, proceeding from Labrador to Cape Horn and
back by the coast of Africa, and two cruisers visiting the Pacific
Coast and the adjacent islands; the movements of the Cape Squadron and
of the Eastern Fleet in China, Australia, and the Indian Ocean: so
imposing and ubiquitous a display of the flag and of naval power has
never before been attained by our own Navy.”

The statement goes on to explain the special circumstances--use
in shallow inland waters, etc., etc., which alone are held by the
Admiralty to justify the use of gunboats.

This policy is from time to time impugned by people who have no need
to count the cost of the alternative policy. Doubtless it would be
convenient, as a temporary emergency arises here or there over the
surface of the globe, if at that very spot some British cruiser or
gunboat promptly appeared ready to protect British interests, or to
sink in the attempt. Indeed, for some time this was the ideal at
which the Admiralty aimed. But since the redistribution of the Fleet
the Empire has had to do without the ubiquitous gunboat, and, if the
truth be told, scarcely seems to have missed it. There are one or two
valuable cases in point. For a long time the Foreign Office, or rather
the Ambassador at Constantinople, pressed for the restoration of the
second stationnaire. The Admiralty sternly refused. The only noticeable
result of this dangerous policy so far has been that the French have
followed our example and withdrawn their second vessel.

An even more remarkable case occurred in Uruguay. A poaching Canadian
sealer had been captured by the Uruguayan authorities, and language
was used as if the disruption of the Empire would follow a refusal on
the part of the Admiralty to liberate her crew by force. For a time
the Admiralty was practically in revolt against H.M. Government, and
then--everything blew over. The dispute was settled by diplomatic
action and the local courts of law.

The question of the small vessel for police duties will long be with
us. Vice-Consuls and Resident Commissioners will, no doubt, continue
to act on the great principle: When in doubt wire for a gunboat.
The Foreign and Colonial Offices, to whom the dispatch of a gunboat
means no more than persuading a gentleman in Whitehall to send a
telegram saying she is to go, will probably never quite realise why the
gentleman should be so perverse as to refuse. But the matter is really
now a “chose jugée”; the Admiralty battle has been fought and won,
and it only remains for the Admiralty to adhere to its principles and
decline to give way simply for the sake of a quiet life.


COAST GUARD

                                                           _June, 1906._

The Coast Guard Service was transferred from the control of the
Commissioners of Customs to that of the Admiralty by the Coast Guard
Service Act, 1856, in order to make better provision for--

        (i) The defence of the coasts of the realm;

       (ii) The more ready manning of His Majesty’s Navy in case of
              war or sudden emergency;

      (iii) The protection of the Revenue;

and there is little doubt that at that time the Coast Guard force was
required for these three purposes.

Since that date, however, these requirements have been greatly
modified by the great developments that have taken place in steam, in
electricity, and generally in the conduct of Naval warfare, and also as
regards the inducements and facilities for smuggling.

It is now considered that about 170 War Signal and Wireless Telegraphy
Stations in the United Kingdom are sufficient to give warning of the
approach of an enemy’s ships, and that, as far as the use of the Coast
Guard for Coast Defence is concerned, the remaining 530 Stations and
their personnel are quite unnecessary.

_As an Active Service force the Coast Guard is far from fulfilling
modern fighting requirements, which are so exacting that a man’s
efficiency depends upon his being_ continuously _associated with highly
technical duties on board ship, and employment in the Coast Guard_
(_even with the arranged periodical training in the Fleet_) _is found
to be inconsistent with these requirements._

Again, as a Reserve, though it fulfils the requirements of such a
force, yet its cost (largely due to the heavy expense of housing the
men and their families) is out of all proportion to that at which the
efficient Royal Fleet Reserve can now be maintained.

The Coast Guard being treated as an Active Service force in the
Estimates, the numbers are included in the number of men voted for the
Fleet, and help to make up the total of 129,000; but as the 4,000 Coast
Guard men are appropriated for duties away from the chief Naval ports,
they are not available for the ordinary work of the Fleet, and the
peace resources are correspondingly reduced, while the extra charges
for the Coast Guard tend largely to increase the expense of maintaining
the Active Service force.

If, on the other hand, the Coast Guard be treated as a Reserve only,
the expense is still more disproportionate, as, in comparison with
the small retainers, charges for a week’s annual drill and small
prospective pension, which make up the whole expense entailed in
the maintenance of the Royal Fleet Reserve, there are the Full Pay,
Victualling, Housing, and numerous miscellaneous allowances and charges
of a permanent force maintained in small units under the most expensive
conditions.

Therefore, the maintenance of the Coast Guard by the Admiralty not
only entails a reduction of the number of highly-trained active
service ratings in the Fleet at sea, but also an unnecessarily large
expenditure on a Reserve.

As regards the use of the Coast Guard for the protection of the
Revenue, the arrangements made when the Coast Guard was transferred
to the control of the Admiralty might now be considerably modified.
A large proportion of the coast of the United Kingdom is still
patrolled nightly by the Coast Guard as a precaution against smuggling,
but looking to the increase in population and the number of towns
and villages round the coasts, the development of telegraphic
communication, and the great reduction in the inducements to smuggling,
this service seems to be no longer required; and some other adequate
arrangement for the protection of the Revenue might be made by a small
addition to the present Customs Force, assisted by the local Police, in
addition to the watch still kept at those Coast Guard Stations which
would be maintained as Naval Signal Stations.

Even in the cases in which the existing Coast Guard may be considered
to afford valuable protection to the Revenue, it must be remembered
that in case of War or for Great Manœuvres, the men would be withdrawn
to the Fleet from all stations except the Naval War Signal Stations.

In any case the employment of highly-trained seamen to perform simple
police duties on shore cannot be justified, and the expense is much
greater than it would be were a civilian force to be employed.

Certain other duties, principally in connection with life-saving and
wrecks, under the Board of Trade, have also been undertaken by the
Coast Guard; but these, however valuable, do not constitute a _raison
d’être_ for the Coast Guard, and it is quite feasible to make adequate
local arrangements for carrying out these services, should the Coast
Guard be removed. No more striking illustration of the feasibility of
this can be given than the National Lifeboat Organisation, and to that
body, aided perhaps by a Government grant, these services could, no
doubt, be easily, economically, and efficiently transferred.

Owing to the growing naval armaments of other Nations, and the
consequent necessary increase in the Navy, the Admiralty has found it
necessary carefully to consider the whole question of the expenditure
under the Naval Votes in order to eliminate therefrom any services
which are unnecessary from the point of view of immediate readiness and
efficiency for war. About £1,000,000 of the Naval Votes is diverted
to services which only indirectly concern the Navy, and are not
material to the fighting efficiency of the Service. Of this about half
(£500,000) is annually absorbed by the Coast Guard.

From a Naval point of view the greater part of this heavy annual
expenditure is wholly unnecessary, and it is also very doubtful, from
what has been before pointed out, whether for Revenue purposes a
force such as the Coast Guard is now required; while if it be still
required in certain localities, it would be more economical to replace
the present expensive Naval detachments by a Civilian service. By
such a transfer the whole of the present expense of training men as a
fighting force would be saved and there would be no deterioration in an
important part of the Naval active personnel such as is now inevitable.

There can be no comparison between the cost of a Revenue force and
that of a Naval force, the cost of Naval training, which is very
considerable, being dispensed with in the former case. Therefore,
there is no doubt that, from the point of efficiency and economy, the
substitution of civilians for Naval ratings would be a great saving to
the State.


OBSERVATORIES.

                                                    _21st August, 1906._

In the past Greenwich Observatory has been of great importance to the
Navy, inasmuch as all the data necessary for the navigation of ships
by astronomical observation have been compiled there. The testing of
chronometers has been carried out at Greenwich since their invention in
1762, while the Cape Observatory was instituted in 1820 in order to
supply data concerning Southern stars not visible from Greenwich.

In recent years, however, the familiarity with Ocean routes that has
been attained; the greatly extended area of coast surveys, and the
admirable system of lights and beacons established throughout the
navigational zones of the world, have in the course of years caused the
work of the Observatories to become of less importance to practical
navigation, and more a matter of scientific research. The photographic
mapping of the heavens, by which stars invisible to the naked eye are
discovered, is not a necessity to navigation, nor to the Naval Service.

At the present time, therefore, it may be said that the only work
done by the Observatories which is directly useful to the Navy, is
the testing and storing of chronometers; observing the astronomical
changes connected with the heavenly bodies for the purpose of obtaining
data for the correction of the Nautical Almanack; supplying accurate
time for time signals and meridian distance work, and taking magnetic
observations.

This sphere of usefulness is not of advantage to the Navy alone.
The Mercantile Marine derives equal benefit from the work of the
Observatories. Greenwich time is indispensable to Railway Companies to
enable them to work their complicated systems with accuracy, and it is
equally indispensable to the Postal Authorities for the proper working
of every post and telegraph office in the Kingdom. Although the staff
of the Observatories is very largely occupied upon services of this
public character, neither the Board of Trade, nor Lloyd’s, nor the
various Mercantile Shipping Associations, nor the Railway Companies,
nor the General Post Office, have made any contribution towards their
cost, while, on the other hand, in one case, that of the Post Office,
the Admiralty is charged with a heavy annual payment for postal and
telegraphic communications. The London Water Companies are greatly
assisted by the Greenwich rainfall observations, but they pay nothing
for them, neither do they supply the Admiralty with water gratuitously.

It is fitting that the British Empire should possess a National
Observatory, but it is not equitable that Naval funds should bear the
whole expense.

When criticism is directed against the magnitude of the Navy Estimates,
it rarely happens that the critic takes the trouble to ascertain of
what Items the Votes are made up; on the other hand, money voted for
the Royal Observatories is passed by the House without much question,
because it happens to form part of Estimates which are of such great
magnitude.

The present procedure tends therefore to obscure the actual sum total
of the Navy Estimates, and at the same time it prevents the application
to the Royal Observatories of the same Parliamentary criticism which is
applied to the Civil Service Estimates.




CHAPTER IX

NAVAL PROBLEMS

    [The three privately printed volumes entitled “Naval
    Necessities,” 1904, 1905, and 1906, contain papers written
    or collected by Sir John Fisher, as Commander-in-Chief at
    Portsmouth and as First Sea Lord of the Admiralty, bearing upon
    the Naval Reforms which he then introduced or contemplated. The
    following selections from these papers tell their own story.]


_Sir John Fisher to Lord Selborne, First Lord of the Admiralty._

    DEAR LORD SELBORNE, ...

    You remember you glanced through some manuscript in my office
    at Portsmouth the day you embarked in “Enchantress,” and I
    gathered that you saw much in them that commended itself to
    you. Well! having thus more or less got a favourable opinion
    from you, I elaborated that manuscript which you had read, and
    printed it with my confidential printer; ... then I gave it
    secretly to the five best brains in the Navy below the rank of
    Admiral to thresh out; and associated two other brains for the
    consideration of the types of future fighting vessels; then
    I selected out of those seven brains the one with the most
    facile pen and ... said to him: “Write a calm and dispassionate
    précis for me to give the First Lord.” You may be confident (as
    confident as I know you are) that the First Sea Lord won’t ever
    sell you! that these seven brains may be absolutely relied
    upon for secrecy. I have tested each of them for many years!

    These are the seven brains: Jackson, F.R.S., Jellicoe, C.B.,
    Bacon, D.S.O., Madden, M.V.O., Wilfred Henderson (who has all
    the signs of the Zodiac after his name!), associated with Gard,
    M.V.O., Chief Constructor of Portsmouth Dockyard, and who
    splendidly kept the Mediterranean Fleet efficient for three
    years, and Gracie, the best Marine Engineer in the world!

    This is the “modus operandi” I suggest to you. If these
    proposals in their rough outline commend themselves to you and
    our colleagues on the Board, then let me have these seven,
    assisted by Mr. Boar (who is a mole in the Accountant-General’s
    Department--you know of him only by upheavals of facts and
    figures!), and secretly these eight will get out a detailed
    statement supported by facts and figures for consideration
    before we take a step further!...

    Please now just a few words of explanation at the possibly
    apparent (but in no ways real) slight put on those at the
    Admiralty who might be thought the right persons to conduct
    these detailed inquiries instead of the eight brains I’ve
    mentioned!

    In the first place, any such heavy extraneous work (such as is
    here involved) means an utter dislocation of the current work
    of the Admiralty if carried out by the regular Admiralty staff!
    and as any such _extraneous_ work must of necessity give place
    to any very pressing _current_ work, then the extraneous work
    doesn’t get done properly--so both suffer!--But further! these
    seven other spirits (not more wicked than any of those at the
    Admiralty!) will be absolutely untrammelled by any remarks of
    their own in the official records in the Admiralty, and will
    not be cognisant (and so not influenced!) by the past written
    official minutes of the High and Mighty Ones, and so we shall
    get the directness and unfettered candour that we desire!
    (Parenthesis:--A most distinguished man at the War Office
    used to think he had gained his point and blasted the Admiralty
    by collecting extracts 20 years old with opposing decisions!
    absolutely regardless that what is right to-day may be wrong
    to-morrow! but he traded on what we all dislike--_the charge of
    inconsistency!_--Why! the two most inconsistent men who ever
    lived, the two greatest men who ever lived and the two most
    successful men who ever lived, were Nelson and Napoleon!)

    Nelson most rightly said that no sailor could ever be such a
    born ass as to attack forts with ships (_he was absolutely
    right_), and then he went straight at them at Copenhagen.
    Napoleon said, “_L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace!_” and
    then he went and temporised at Warsaw for three solid weeks
    (was it a Polish Countess?), and so got ruined at Moscow in
    consequence of this delay.

    _Circumstances alter cases!_ That’s the answer to the charge
    of inconsistency. So please let us have this excellent and
    unparalleled small working Committee to thresh out all these
    details (when the general outlines have been considered), but
    this very special point will no doubt be borne in mind:--“Until
    you have these details how can you say you approve of the
    outline?” So what has to be said finally is that if the
    facts and figures corroborate what is sketched out, then the
    proposals can be considered for adoption, so the ultimate
    result is this:--“Let the Committee get on at once.”

                                                       J. A. FISHER.
                                                         19/10/04.

[Illustration: SIR JOHN FISHER AND SIR COLIN KEPPEL (CAPTAIN OF THE
ROYAL YACHT).]


MAIN PRINCIPLES OF SCHEME.

_Future Types of Fighting Vessels._

Four classes only of fighting vessels.

Uniform armament (except torpedo attack guns) in all classes of
fighting vessels.

Inviolate watertight bulkheads.

Subdivision of magazines.

Protection of magazines.

Abolish Ram.

No guns on main deck (so splendid light and airy accommodation for
officers, and crew, with huge square ports and magnificent deck space).

Reduction of all weights and scantlings.


“_Out of Date_” _Fighting Ships_.

Removal as soon as possible of all “out of date” ships (that is, ships
unfit for fighting).

To abolish gradually the employment of all _slow_ vessels below 1st
Class Armoured Cruisers.

To substitute efficient fighting vessels with nucleus crews for all the
stationary obsolete vessels now in commission, and also for all the
training vessels and all the Coastguard Cruisers.


_Revision of Stations._

South Atlantic, West Indies, and Cape to form a squadron under chief
command of the Admiral of the Cape Station, who will be a Vice-Admiral
in the future with three Rear-Admirals under him.[6]

The Commander-in-Chief in China to have the chief command and strategic
handling of the squadrons in China, Australia, East Indies, and
Pacific. He can be a full Admiral with two Vice-Admirals and two
Rear-Admirals under him. _The object is to employ Flag Officers as
much as possible at sea._

Effective Cruisers to be substituted for the present varying types of
vessels forming all these squadrons.


_Personnel._

Reduction in entry of Boys, and increase of entry of Non-continuous
Service Men and of “Northampton” lads.

Introduction of new system of Reserve (long service tempered by short
service!)


_Nucleus Crews._

Two-yearly commissions to be instituted, and with no material change of
officers and men during the two years.

All the fighting vessels in Reserve to have an efficient nucleus
crew of approximately two-fifths of the full crew, together with all
important Gunnery ratings as well as the Captain of the ship and the
principal Officers.

The periodical exercise and inspection of the ships by the responsible
Flag Officer who will take them to the war.

This Flag Officer will suffer for any want of efficiency and
preparation for war of these vessels. These vessels to be collected
in squadrons at Portsmouth, Plymouth, and Chatham, according to the
Station to which they are going as the reinforcements.


_Signals._

Revision of our methods of Signalling to be based on the class of
Signals that will be used in war.

To abolish all systems and all Signals that are only of use in peace
time.

The Signal and Exercise Books of the Fleet to be ruthlessly revised and
cut down with this in view.

The present establishment of Signalmen on board all vessels to be
reduced to the numbers that _are necessary_ in war (present system of
superabundance of Signalmen embarked in Flagships criminally wrong).


_Defence of Naval Ports._

Modern conditions necessitate certain floating defences requiring
seamen to manipulate them. Soldiers apparently can’t do it!

Divided control of defence of Naval Ports impossible between Navy and
Army.

Admiralty must have sole responsibility that all our Naval Arsenals are
kept open for egress and ingress of our Fleet in war.

Local defences should, therefore, apparently be under the Naval
Commander-in-Chief.

But all these arrangements for any such transfer of responsibility
from War Office to Admiralty must be so planned as to obviate all
possibility of Fleet men being used for shore work in war, _and there
must be no risk of lessening the sea experience of the officers and men
of the Fleet_; hence it will be imperative that there should be an
entire transference of the whole of the Garrison Artillery from Army to
Navy, as well as the responsibility for all ordnance.

All this involves so immense an addition to the responsibilities of the
Admiralty, apart from the one chief function of the Navy of seeking out
and fighting the enemy’s fleets, that we have to hesitate; but we can’t
let matters go on as at present.


NOTES BY SIR JOHN FISHER ON NEW PROPOSALS.


_Organisation for War._

    “_If the Trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare
    himself to the battle?_”

                                  (St. Paul, I Corinthians, xiv. 8.)

The object of the following remarks is to make clear what has now to be
done to organise and prepare for war. What are the two great essentials?

  _I._   _The Sufficiency of Strength and the Fighting Efficiency
          of the Fleet._

  _II._  _Absolute Instant Readiness for War._

To get these two essentials an immense deal is involved! It is believed
they can both be got with a great reduction in the Navy Estimates!

This reduction, combined with an undeniable increase in the fighting
efficiency of the Navy, involves great changes and depends absolutely
on one condition:--

    _The Scheme herein shadowed forth must be adopted as a whole!_

Simply because all portions of it are absolutely essential--and it is
all so interlaced that any tampering will be fatal!

The country will acclaim it! the income-tax payer will worship it! the
Navy will growl at it! (they always do growl at first!)

    _But we shall be Thirty per cent. more fit to fight and we
    shall be ready for instant war!_

and in time when we get rid of our redundancies in useless ships and
unnecessary men it will probably be 30 per cent. cheaper!

The outline of the various proposals will first be given. _No one
single point must be taken as more important than another. Each is part
of a whole_; As St. Paul well observes in the xii. Chapter of the I
Corinthians:--

    “_The eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee: nor
    again the head to the feet, I have no need of you. Nay, much
    more those members of the body which seem to be more feeble,
    are necessary._”

So is it of this scheme! All its parts are essential for the perfection
we must have if England is to remain the “Mistress of the Seas”!

The British Nation floats on the British Navy! So we must have no doubt
whatever about its fighting supremacy and its instant readiness for
war! To ensure this and at the same time _to effect the economy which
the finances of the country render imperative_ there must be drastic
changes! To carry these out we must have the three R’s! We must be
Ruthless, Relentless, Remorseless! We must tell interested people whose
interests are going to be ignored that what the Articles of War have
said since the time of Queen Elizabeth is truer than ever!

“_It is the Navy whereon under the good providence of God, the wealth,
peace, and safety of this country doth chiefly depend!_”

If the Navy is not supreme, no Army however large is of the slightest
use. It’s not _invasion_ we have to fear if our Navy is beaten,

    _It’s Starvation!_

What’s the good of an army if it has got an empty belly? In Mr. John
Morley’s famous and splendid words at Manchester on November 8th, 1893:
“_Everybody knows, Liberals as well as Tories, that it is indispensable
that we should have not only a powerful Navy, but I may say, an
all-powerful Navy._” And when we have that--then History may repeat
itself, and Mahan’s glorious words _will be applicable in some other
great national crisis!_ the finest words and the truest words in the
English language!

“_Nelson’s far-distant, storm-beaten ships, upon which the Grand
Army never looked, stood between it and the dominion of the
world._”--(Mahan, Vol. II, page 118.)

And the Navy must always so stand! Supreme--unbeaten! So we must
have no tinkering! No pandering to sentiment! No regard for
susceptibilities! No pity for anyone! We must be Ruthless, Relentless,
and Remorseless! And we must therefore have The Scheme! The Whole
Scheme!! And Nothing But The Scheme!!!

Just let us take one instance as an illustration of a mighty reform
(lots more will follow later, but the sledge hammer comes in handy
here!). During the 12 months ending June 30th, 1904 (this last month!)
the ships of the Home Fleet, the Channel Fleet, and the Cruiser
Squadron were in Portsmouth Dockyard for over 30 per cent. of the year!
Disorganised and unfit for sea! See what this means! A battleship costs
over £100,000 a year for its up-keep, irrespective of repairs, but it’s
not the money waste! _it’s the efficiency waste!_

_Every day those Fleets and Squadrons are not together, they are
deteriorating!_

It is only human nature that when in Portsmouth Dockyard, from the
Admiral downwards, all are hankering after their homes! and somehow
or other they get there! the fictions are endless and ingenious, and
extend from “the cradle to the grave!” From an unexpected confinement
to the serious illness of an aged relative! (nearly always a
grandmother! and the baby is always the first one!)

What is the remedy?

It’s Nelsonic--and so simple!

Nelson could not leave Toulon with all his Fleet for nearly four months
out of the year! No! he stayed there for two years without putting
his foot on shore! What he did was to send one or two ships away at a
time to get provisions and water, and to effect any needed repairs.
Let us do the same! We want a fixed base for each Fleet (and so fixed
for war reasons). Thus, for example, the Channel Fleet at Gibraltar,
the Home Fleet at Bantry, or the Forth, and so on. But this is going
into unnecessary detail, and anticipating other parts of the scheme
which must be adopted to make this work! Thus it will be seen later on,
that to enable this great economy in money to be effected (_putting
aside increase of fighting efficiency!_), we must have two years’
commissions! But we can’t have two years’ commissions unless we have
fewer ships in commission! But we can’t have fewer ships in commission
unless we have a redistribution of our Fleet! But we can’t have a
redistribution of our Fleet until we rearrange our strategy! and this
strategy, strange to say, depends on our reserves, and our reserves
depend on a fresh allocation of our personnel, and on a fresh system of
service. _We must have the new scheme of Long Service tempered by Short
Service!_ And this again largely hangs on the types of fighting ships
we are going to have! _But what is the type of ship?_ Not one that goes
to the bottom in two minutes from the effect of one torpedo, and drowns
nearly a thousand men, and takes three years to replace, and costs over
a million sterling! _How many types do we want!_ This is quite easy to
answer if we make up our minds _how we are going to fight_! Who has
made up his mind? _How many of our Admirals have got minds?_

It will be obvious then that the whole of this business is a regular
case of “the house that Jack built,” for one thing follows on another,
_they are all interlaced and interdependent_! That’s why it was said to
begin with:--

_The Scheme! The Whole Scheme!! And Nothing but the Scheme!!!_

One essential feature which has been overlooked must be mentioned
before going further _because imperatively necessary to ensure instant
readiness for war_, but it hangs on all the other points previously
mentioned and which are going to be examined in detail.

The reduction in the number of ships in commission _which is as
necessary for fighting efficiency_ (_when the whole Navy is mobilised
for war_) _as it is conducive to an immense economy must be accompanied
by and associated with two vital requisites_:

I. Every fighting ship in reserve must have a nucleus crew.

II. The reinforcements for the fighting fleets and squadrons must be
collected together while in the reserve at the most convenient ports
and be placed under the Flag Officer who will take them to their war
stations, and this Flag Officer to understand he will be shot like a
dog in case of any inefficiency in these ships in war.

Unless this is carried out the great strategic scheme in contemplation
could not be entertained nor could the number of ships in commission
be reduced as is absolutely essential for the efficiency of those in
reserve, _not on the score of economy at all, but the reduction of
ships in commission is imperative for the fighting efficiency of the
whole fleet when mobilised_.

So we thus get one more illustration of the interdependence of all
portions of the scheme and beg again to refer to St. Paul as previously
quoted.

It is convenient here to mention that the paucity of efficient
Admirals is a most serious matter, and will probably compel the
manufacture of Commodores or of Acting Admirals under a resuscitated
Order-in-Council. The least capable in the respective ranks of the
Navy are the Admirals. It’s not their own fault solely, they have had
no education, and this blot will continue till we have a Naval War
College established at Portsmouth, and Flag Officers and Captains,
hoping for employment, can practically prove their capacity by
manœuvring two fleets of destroyers against each other. This will be
much cheaper and less risky to the Empire than their manœuvring with
the big ships. _Experiments on the scale of 12 inches to a foot are not
economical!_

Mr. Childers was our Attila! He was the “scourge” of the Navy in
many ways, but most of all by his disastrous and frightfully costly
retirement schemes. _The secret of efficiency lies in large lists of
Officers!_ You have then a large field of selection, and a great flow
of promotion, and also no Officer considers it a stigma to be passed
over in company with forty others, and so not to pose as a solitary
monument of ineptitude as he appears at present to himself and his
friends when passed over with the present small lists of Flag Officers.

Also “_Selection by non-employment_” goes so easily with large lists
(and with large lists is accepted as a necessity, and not resented as a
personal affront!).


PURGING THE NAVY OF OBSOLETE VESSELS.

Out of 193 ships at present in commission (not counting destroyers)
organised in fleets, 63 _only_ are of such calibre as not to cause
an Admiral grave concern if allowed to wander from the protection of
larger ships. There are among these several ships which should be paid
off as soon as possible, being absolutely of no fighting value. And
there are, further, several ships having trained naval crews doing the
work usually performed by small merchant tramps. Further still, there
are in our Home Ports many ships taking up valuable berthing space,
requiring maintenance and repair, which never under any circumstances
whatever would be used in war time.

The above useless vessels being in commission means awful waste of
money.

Every ship that has defects taken in hand, and which would not be of
use in war, is a waste of money to the country.

Of course objections will be raised, and it will be shown that the Navy
cannot be run without them, but wipe them out, and in a year no one
will remember that they ever existed.

It is well to review generally our distant stations and the composition
of their squadrons.

The Navy and the country have grown so accustomed to the territorial
nomenclature of our distant squadrons that their connection with the
sea is considerably obscured, and their association with certain
lands has led to a tacit belief that those particular squadrons are
for the protection of the lands they frequent, and not generally for
the destruction of the enemy’s fleet wherever it may happen to be. Of
course no such idea is accepted by the Admiralty, but, in spite of the
broad principles of strategy involved, certain fleets are composed
largely with a view to work in restricted waters, which vessels would
be a source of danger and weakness on the sudden outbreak of war with a
combination of Powers.

Take the combination of ships on each of the following stations: North
America, Cape of Good Hope, East Indies, and Australia. Remember the
“Variag.” What happened in the small area of the theatre of operations
in the present war will be repeated in the larger theatre of operations
of a conflict of European Powers when the whole world will be involved.
What will happen to our “Odins,” “Redbreasts,” “Fantomes,” “Dwarfs,”
etc.? aye! and what will happen to our “Scyllas,” “Katoombas,” and
“Hyacinths,” if caught sight of by first class cruisers of modern
armament on foreign stations?[7] Lucky if they can reach a neutral
port, disarm, and have their crews interned for the remainder of the
war. Lucky, indeed, if a far worse fate does not befall them. At all
events, such wholesale scattering of the British foreign fleets would
lead to irreparable loss of prestige among the smaller States where
these little vessels were usually located.

Now is there any necessity for such numbers of useless fighting ships?
Cannot more efficient classes be substituted for them, or, at all
events, some of them?

What we have to face is the probability of a serious combination of
strong Powers against us, for then we will be unable to spare two
first class cruisers to go in search of individual enemy’s first class
cruisers, who, if not caught, may sweep round and lick up or force
into neutral ports all our inefficient small fry.

Surely the three Atlantic squadrons should be of such strength as
to be able to rendezvous and form a fleet more or less absolutely
self-protective, to say nothing of being offensive. Such a squadron,
under one admiral in war time, would be an effective Atlantic squadron,
and would protect our interests by holding the ocean against enemy’s
cruisers.

Such squadrons can be formed without increasing the personnel of the
Navy, and, moreover, the crews would be in ships that would be used in
war instead of being in “floating anxieties.”

Now for the present, sufficient cruisers, first class, do not exist to
meet the requirements of supplying ships to take the place of smaller
obsolete ones, and also for reserve purposes.

For the present a large proportion of cruisers, second class, must
be retained, but it is hoped that these will in time be replaced by
cruisers, first class, in the proportion of one cruiser, first class,
to three cruisers, second or third class. No one can argue that one
first class cruiser is not a superior fighting unit to three cruisers
second or third class. Also one defect list instead of three!

If it should be insisted on that certain ports require certain small
vessels, then they should be earmarked for that purpose, and only such
places be recognised which larger vessels cannot frequent, such as the
rivers on the West Coast of Africa (our territory), shallow rivers in
China where no question of neutrality can arise, or special places of
this nature. It should be overwhelmingly proved to the satisfaction of
the Admiralty that essential conditions necessitate the presence of
useless fighting ships before they relax their efforts to have such
useless ships removed.

It should be accepted as a principle that the great aim and object of
the Admiralty is to have nothing floating on the waters except the
four fundamental types of fighting vessels, and that (for the present)
lack of ships of the necessary classes prevents this being realised,
but that as the delivery of ships takes place, the substitution will
automatically follow.

The Foreign Office will in time be bound to recognise the real
efficiency of the scheme, even if a consul is robbed of the shadow of
support of a gunboat under his window, but has the substantial strength
of a first class cruiser substituted at the end of a telegraph wire.

_The danger that is eternally present to the Navy is over confidence in
our preparedness for war._

The chief cause of unpreparedness for war is want of appreciation of
the cumulative effect of daily small changes in our ships and armament
on the whole question of strategy and shipbuilding.

Changes have slipped so gradually from wooden sailing ships through
slow steam iron vessels to our present splendid ships of war that
the tendency has always been to subordinate our strategy to our ship
construction, rather than to mould our war ship design to suit our
strategy.

_Strategy should govern the types of ships to be designed._

_Ship design, as dictated by strategy, should govern tactics._

_Tactics should govern details of armaments._

In approaching the important question of ship design the first
essential is to divest our minds totally of the idea that a single type
of ship as now built is necessary, or even advisable, then to consider
the strategic use of each different class, especially weighing the
antagonistic attributes of nominally similar classes in the old wars.

To commence with the battleship.

The sole reason for the existence of the old line of battleship was
that that ship was the only vessel that could not be destroyed except
by a vessel of equal class. This meant that a country possessing the
largest number of best equipped battleships could lay them alongside
the enemy, or off the ports where the enemy were. Transports with
the escort of a few battleships could then proceed to make oversea
conquests. Squadrons of battleships or cruisers escorting the convoy
of merchant ships and keeping the line of communications open. In each
case the battleship, being able to protect everything it had under
its wing from any smaller vessel, was the ultimate naval strength of
the country. _Then_ it was that, by means of the battleship only,
was the command of the sea gained and held. _Let us be quite clear
on the matter, it was solely from the fact that the battleship was
unassailable by any vessel except a battleship that made the command of
the sea by battleships a possibility!_

Hence battleships came to symbolise naval sea strength and supremacy.
For this reason battleships have been built through every change of
construction and material, although by degrees other vessels not
battleships have arisen which can attack and destroy them.

Here therefore there is good ground for inquiry whether the naval
supremacy of a country can any longer be assessed by its battleships.
To build battleships merely to fight enemy’s battleships, so long
as cheaper craft can destroy them, and prevent them of themselves
protecting sea operations, is merely to breed Kilkenny cats unable to
catch rats or mice. For fighting purposes they would be excellent, but
for gaining practical results they would be useless.

This at once forces a consideration as to how a battleship differs from
an armoured cruiser. Fundamentally the battleship sacrifices speed for
a superior armament and protective armour. It is this superiority of
speed that enables an enemy’s ships to be overhauled or evaded that
constitutes the real difference between the two. At the present moment
_naval experience is not sufficiently ripe to abolish totally the
building of battleships_ so long as other countries do not do so.

    _But it is evidently an absolute necessity in future construction
      to make the speed of the battleship approach as nearly as
      possible that of the armoured cruiser._

Next consider the case of the armoured cruiser.

In the old days the frigate was the cruiser, she was unarmoured, that
is, her sides were so much thinner than those of the battleship that
she was not able to fight in the line of battle, but the weak gun fire
of those days permitted close scouting by such unprotected vessels,
she could approach a battleship squadron very closely without fear of
damage, she could sail round a fleet and count their numbers without
danger to herself, unless chased off by other frigates, she was a scout
and a commerce destroyer. Similarly with present day armoured cruisers,
they can force their way up to within sight of a fleet, and observe
them, unless chased off by other armoured cruisers, but to do this they
have to be given a certain amount of protective armour.

The range of eyesight has remained constant, that of gunfire has
increased. Speed is a necessity to ensure safety, armour protection to
ensure vision.

It is evident, from the above considerations, that the functions of the
frigate have devolved on the armoured cruiser to a greater extent than
have the functions of the line of battleship devolved on the modern
battleship.

But how about the unarmoured cruisers and those of low speed?

With loss of protection a cruiser loses her power of reasonable
approach for observation purposes, and if to this be added a loss of
reasonable speed her safety is gone. Cruisers without high speed and
protection are entirely and absolutely useless.

Every vessel that has not high scouting speed, or the highest defensive
and offensive powers, _is useless for fighting purposes_.

This is true of every class of vessel between the first class armoured
cruiser and the fast torpedo vessel.


NUCLEUS CREWS.

It is impossible to exaggerate the vital importance to the nation of
having all the reserve ships absolutely ready for instant war.

Our reserve ships, as they are now, are not, and cannot be made really
efficient fighting units under several months of commission. There
is no doubt that great strides towards rapid mobilisation have been
made of late years, but merely to hustle a complement of the required
ratings into a ship, is not to make her a really efficient fighting
machine.

    _The keystone of our preparedness for war has now to be
    inserted, namely, the provision of efficient nucleus crews._

                     _This can be done to-morrow._

A nucleus crew should consist of approximately two-fifths of her
engine-room complement, the whole of her turret crews, gun layers
and sight-setters for all guns, all important special ratings, and
two-fifths of her normal crew, her captain, and all important officers.

The ship can proceed half-yearly, or quarterly, as may be required, to
sea with her fighting ship’s company to carry out firing exercises, or
to work under the Admiral or Commodore who will command her and her
consorts in war, and be as nearly perfectly efficient as any ship, not
always at sea, can be.

No more men above our present requirements need be entered, training in
gunnery and torpedo schools need not be interfered with, and a saving
of money to the taxpayer effected.


SUBSIDIARY SERVICES OF WAR.

We are now busily engaged in perfecting each and all of these
subsidiary services; but they are not yet perfect. In some important
respects we are as yet far from it (Rome was not built in a day!), but
we now emphasise the fact in order that matters may be pushed on by all
concerned, from the Prime Minister downwards, with the utmost energy
and vigour!

The items are not taken in the order of their relative importance, but
for convenience of argument.

There is the service of all the auxiliary vessels of the Fleet for
supplying coal, ammunition, stores, provisions, water, materials for
repairs, &c., and also the multitudes of fast mercantile vessels we
require as Scouts; and there is also the nature of the employment of
the armed mercantile cruisers to be settled. All these points have
been carefully considered in the past, but in all and every one of
them there is that most deadly of all deadly drawbacks to fighting
readiness, the leaving certain things to be dealt with “_when the time
comes_.” The time will come like the Day of Judgment! There won’t be
time for doing anything, not even for repentance! We must go to the
very utmost limit of preparedness, not one little item must be left to
be dealt with “when the time comes.” We want all these vessels, without
any exception whatever, to be as ready for a sudden emergency as is
now the main Fighting Fleet! So therefore, day by day, we must know by
name each vessel for every service, and the orders for every captain
of every single one of this multitude of mercantile auxiliaries must
be prepared, and he (each several captain) must thoroughly understand
these orders beforehand; they must be explained to him by “one who
knows,” and when that captain leaves England for his next trade voyage
(and his ship is therefore no longer available), then the operation
must be repeated with the captain of the substituted vessel! It must
be laid down where every ship is to load, what route she is to follow,
what eventualities she has to guard against! _All, and together, must
be detailed and day by day kept perfect!_

Again, who are the officers at every port superintending the imparting
of this information every day of the year, to the daily fresh captains
of daily fresh ships, replacing others daily, going on their usual
trade voyages? Who is the Flag Officer in supreme charge of all these
superintending Port Officers? What are the names of the retired
Commissioned or Warrant Officers who may be allocated to take passage
in all the more important auxiliary vessels? such, for instance, and
above all, as the Ammunition and Repair ships, so as to ensure the
proper control and distribution of the cargo, as well as the efficient
and prompt action of the ship herself, to be at the right place at
the right time. Every Commander-in-Chief must know in minute detail
every particular about every one of these vessels that are coming to
him. He must know it _now_. He must know it _day by day_! He must
have his own agent at home to look after his interests and to be
responsible to him (the Commander-in-Chief) for the completeness of all
the arrangements,--if not complete, then this agent must report the
Superintending Port Officers for their incompetency.

All this scheme above sketched out may involve immense labour and great
expense, _but it has got to be done_! Not a bit of use having the Fleet
at all, if you don’t feed it, and also feed it well!

Quite as a separate service, apart from all that has been mentioned
above, is the dissemination of intelligence and its suppression.

We must not (as has been hitherto accepted) permit the splendid costly
fighting vessels of the Fleet to be criminally wasted by being sent
here and there as messengers! Fast unarmoured mercantile steamers
must constitute the squadrons of the Sea Intelligence Department, and
instead of our Admirals running after information with costly armoured
cruisers, we must run after the Admirals with the information, with
easily obtainable cheap (because non-fighting), fast mercantile vessels.

All this is but a brief review of what is in progress, and what has to
be done, but _there remains above all_ that daily consideration at the
Admiralty, and by every Admiral in command, of what would have to be
done _that very day_ in case of war, with the most unexpected, as well
as the most expected opponent!


A RETROSPECT (JULY, 1906).

The most striking fact to an outsider is the astonishing confidence and
loyalty of the Navy in its rulers which has been exhibited during the
last two years of relentless reorganisation.

Naval Officers, as a class, are conservative and dislike change, and
as a rule are prepared to resist it. The manner in which the recent
changes have been received, root and branch and sweeping as they were,
shows, as nothing else can, the necessity for reforms. Compare the
insignificant agitation (which has, however, now entirely collapsed),
in the Navy over the vast and drastic reforms of the last two years
with the agitation in the Army over the trifling matter of getting rid
of two battalions of Guards!

So let us be grateful--adequately grateful--to the officers and men of
the Navy for their splendid loyalty during the introduction of reforms,
some of which have hit them very hard, notably the sudden bringing
home and paying off of the large number of vessels that were wiped
out of the Navy as not being up to the required standard of fighting
efficiency. And there was also the redistribution of the Fleet, which
deprived many officers of advantageous appointments and seriously
disturbed domestic arrangements.

But the fact is that the Navy sees the fighting advantages we have
gained, and so has loyally responded to the demands on its sense of
duty.

As an excellent writer in the “North American Review” for June so aptly
expresses it, the Navy saw that it was steam-manship that was wanted,
and so, as a body, they welcomed the new scheme of training both of
officers and men. They saw also that to have every vessel of the Navy,
large and small, mobilised and efficient to fight within three hours
in the dead of night, as practically exemplified in the recent Grand
Manœuvres, is a result which justifies all the drastic measures of the
Board of Admiralty.

The Navy also recognises the incomparable fighting advantages of the
new era in giving us an unparalleled gunnery efficiency, as exemplified
in the fact that before that new era there were 2,000 more misses than
hits in the annual gunlayers’ competition, while in the year after
there were 2,000 more hits than misses! In the new order the best ship
is the one that can catch the enemy soonest, and hit him hardest and
oftenest; under the old system these considerations were certainly not
the primary ones.

The Navy sees also that, while the fighting efficiency of the British
Fleet and its instant readiness for war has become a household
word amongst the Admiralties of the world, at the same time vast
economies--to be reckoned in many millions--have been effected; for
instance, our harbours, docks, and basins are ridded of obsolete
vessels and thus made adequate for the accommodation of our fighting
fleet, for which there was no room previously, and no less a sum than
13 millions sterling was at one time contemplated as necessary to give
the required accommodation. The whole of that 13 millions in proposed
works has been cancelled.

Nor have the officers and men been forgotten. The men have had a
quarter of a million sterling practically added to their pay; one item
alone is £75,000 a year for increase of pensions to petty officers,
and another £47,000 a year in giving them their food allowance when
on leave, and other similar and just concessions make up the balance.
Further improvements in the position of the lower deck are now under
consideration and will shortly be ready for announcement, _i.e._,
Ratings Committee.

The officers, again, no longer pay for the bands out of their own
pockets, and the system of Nucleus Crews gives them an amount of Home
Service combined with sea-time, with all its domestic advantages,
beyond anything ever before obtaining in the Navy.

Again, it is recognised by all but a few misguided misanthropes that
the new shipbuilding policy is a magnificent departure in fighting
policy. _We ask the officers who are going to fight, what they
want, and we build thereto._ Formerly vessels were simply belated
improvements on their predecessors. Admirals had to make the best
use they could of the heterogeneous assemblage of vessels which the
idiosyncrasies of talented designers and Controllers of the Navy had
saddled us with, to the embarrassment of those whose business it was
to use them in battle, and to the bitter bewilderment of types in the
brain of the Board of Admiralty! Theory was entirely divorced from
practice, with the lamentable result that when the two were recently
brought together, and the “Dreadnought” was evolved, it was found that
the whole Navy had practically become obsolete!

“First catch your hare” is the recipe in Mrs. Glasse’s Cookery Book
for “jugged hare,” and so speed has been put in the forefront in every
class of vessel from battleship to submarine, and as it’s no use having
the speed without the wherewithal to demolish the enemy, the armament
of our new ships, as so fully exemplified in the “Dreadnought,” has
received such a development that that vessel is equal to any two and a
half battleships at present existing.

The efficacy of the Nucleus Crew system has also been obvious to the
whole Fleet in the unprecedented exemptions from machinery defects, and
the unexampled gunnery efficiency, coupled with a saving of about 50
per cent. in repairs of ships, which incidentally has led in a large
measure to the reduction of 6,000 Dockyard workmen. _And it must never
be forgotten that every penny not spent in a fighting ship or on a
fighting man is a penny taken away from the day of battle!_

The management of the Royal Dockyards has now been placed on a much
sounder footing, more akin to the organisation in similar commercial
establishments, where any undue extravagance or unnecessary executive
machinery means loss of money to the shareholders, and is visited by
pains and penalties on the officials directly responsible. At the same
time the desirable possibilities of ready expansion in war time to
suit the varying requirements of a purely naval repairing and building
establishment have been maintained.

The Navy also sees the great strategic advantages of our Fleets
exercising where they are likely to fight. As Nelson said, “_The battle
ground should be the drill ground_.”

The placid waters and lovely weather of the Mediterranean do not fit
our seamen for the fogs and gales of the North Sea, or accustom them
to the rigours of a northern winter, when the icicles hang down over
the bed or the hammock of the Torpedo Boat Commander and his men, as
in the North Sea last winter when we sent 147 Torpedo Craft suddenly
to exercise at sea; and though sent on a full power trial of many
hours, on first being mobilised, not a single defect or breakdown was
experienced. Since that date the arrangements for the Torpedo Craft
have been still further perfected, and now the Destroyers are all
organised according to the strategic requirements of the situation of
the moment, and are definitely detailed in flotillas and divisions,
with their store and repair ships and reserves, according to the
approved modern methods of torpedo warfare as exemplified in the
Russo-Japanese War.

The Navy also sees and welcomes the untold advantage given by the
Nucleus Crew system of instant war readiness, as exemplified when last
July all our vessels, large and small, in reserve went to sea unnoticed
by the Press and engaged in fighting Manœuvres in the Channel with 200
pendants under the chief command of the Admiral of the Channel Fleet.

No calling out of Reserves or such disorganisation as was incidental to
the old system, when the crews of ships in commission had to be broken
up to leaven the ships of the Reserve that then had no crews at all.




CHAPTER X

NAVAL EDUCATION


I.--COMMON ENTRY.

(_Written in 1905_).

On the 25th of December, 1902, the new system of entry and training of
officers for the Navy was inaugurated.

The fundamental principles of this great reform are:--

  (_a_) The common entry and training of officers of the three
          principal branches of the Service, viz., Combatant or
          Executive, Engineer, and Marine.

  (_b_) The practical amalgamation of these three branches of officers.

  (_c_) The recognition of the fact that the existence of the Navy
          depends on machinery, and that, therefore, all combatant
          officers must be Engineers.

  (_d_) The adoption of the principle that the general education
          and training of all these officers must be completed before
          they go to sea, instead of, as heretofore, dragging on in
          a perfunctory manner during their service as midshipmen,
          to be finally completed by a short “cram” at Greenwich and
          Portsmouth.

When the details of the new scheme were published, it was stated
that at about the age of 20 these officers, who up till then had all
received an identical training, would be appropriated by selection to
the three branches, viz., Executive, Marine, or Engineer; however,
this is unlikely to be carried out in its entirety, and when the time
comes, the march of progress will have prepared us to recognise that
differentiation to this extent is unnecessary, and that the Fleet
will be officered by the combatant officer, who will be equally an
Executive, Marine, or Engineer Officer.

Let us assume this to be true. In spite of the great revolution that
has been brought about since Christmas, 1902, in the Navy, and the
consequent awakening and development of the minds of all officers,
there is not one in one hundred who realises fully what the effects of
this great reform will be.

The Cadets who are at present at Osborne College are being educated
primarily as Mechanical Engineers concurrently with the special
training necessary to make them good seamen, good navigators, and
good commanders. The most important training they have to receive is
undoubtedly that of the Mechanical Engineer, which will ultimately make
them capable of dealing with and handling ANYTHING of a mechanical
nature. In process of learning this they acquire a mathematical
training of a very high order, and, as pure mathematics are the same
all the world over, the various other subjects which the Naval Officer
of the future will be required to be proficient in only necessitate
a little training in the special application of the mathematics of
which they possess a firm grasp. Navigation and nautical astronomy are
simplicity exemplified once the student has learned trigonometry and
algebra. Gunnery, torpedo, and electricity are simply special cases of
mechanical problems. Modern seamanship is practically nothing else but
a practical application of simple mechanical “chestnuts.”

What, therefore, is the meaning of it all?

It means that the Naval Officer of the future will regard machinery,
mechanical work, and mechanical problems as his “bread and butter.” He
will think no more of handling machinery of any sort than the ordinary
mortal does of riding a bicycle; guns, gun-mountings, torpedoes, and
electrical instruments and machines he will regard as special types,
but differing no whit in principle from the primitive stock. Mystery
will disappear. At present it is an unfortunate thing that departmental
jealousy leads the members of each and every department of the
Service to make a mystery of their particular speciality. The Gunnery
Lieutenant, Torpedo Lieutenant, Engineer, and Marine Officer each
resent discussion by “outsiders” of any point in connection with their
speciality, as a piece of unwarrantable presumption, with the result
that each knows all about his own job, and pursues it diligently,
taking care not to poach on anybody else’s preserves, but without any
regard as to whether the Service might not gain in efficiency by a
little more co-operation and collaboration.

From one point of view they are right in being exclusive, because they
know that no one else knows anything about their work, and therefore
discussion with “outsiders” is mere waste of breath, but in future all
this will be changed. Specialities will disappear; the Naval Officer of
the future will see no greater difference between a gun-mounting and a
torpedo, than an Engineer sees between the main engines and the feed
pump.

However, although specialities will disappear, it will always be
necessary to have “experts” in each department. We shall still require
our Lieutenants G., T., and E.; but as at the present time when a
Lieutenant G. is promoted to Commander he drops the G., so also it
seems logical to conclude that the future Lieutenant E. on promotion to
Commander should drop the E.

It is absolutely safe to predict that the Naval Officer of 50 years
hence will smile when he reads that his forefathers had to have an
officer of Commander’s rank appointed to a ship solely for charge of
the main engines. Foreigners gasp when they hear that Lieutenants of
two or three years standing command our destroyers; in other navies
destroyers are usually commanded by Captains de Corvette; and then we
smile when we remember youngsters like Lieutenant Rombulow-Pearse of
the “Sturgeon,” who rescued the crew of the sinking “Decoy” in a gale
of wind, with only his small whaler to help him, and with the loss of
only one man, who disappeared nobody knows how.

The ideal complement of officers of the future therefore will be: 1
Captain, 1 Commander, 1 Lieutenant G., 1 Lieutenant E., 1 Lieutenant
T., 1 Lieutenant M., 1 Lieutenant N., 1 Lieutenant P., and as many
other watchkeepers as necessary.

Enough has been said in the meantime to show how completely the new
system of entry and training of officers has remodelled the British
Navy, and it is with the object of using the case of the officers as an
argument in considering the case of the men, that it has been dilated
on at such length.


STATE EDUCATION IN THE NAVY.

(_This Paper was prepared in 1902 under great obligations to Mr. J. R.
Thursfield._)

Everyone must now feel that the new system of Entry and Education of
Naval Officers must have a fair trial, and all reasonable people will
hold that it deserves one.

There still remains to be faced an argument which is certain to appeal
to democratic sentiment. Broadly stated, it is this--that the new
system, as at present organised, must of necessity take all officers
of the Navy from among the sons of parents who can afford to spend
about £120 a year on their sons from the age of 12½ until they become
Lieutenants at the age of about 20, or even over. In other words, the
officers of the Navy will be drawn exclusively from the well-to-do
classes.

Democratic sentiment will wreck the present system in the long run, if
it is not given an outlet. But let us take the far higher ground of
efficiency: is it wise or expedient to take our Nelsons from so narrow
a class?

[Illustration: “THE DAUNTLESS THREE,” PORTSMOUTH, 1903.

    Sir John Fisher, Commander-in-Chief at Portsmouth.

    Viscount Esher, President of the Committee of War Office
    Reconstruction.

    Sir George Sydenham Clarke, late Governor of Victoria.
]

Surely some small percentage of promising and intelligent boys from the
other classes could be secured and (if caught early enough, as is
now the case) trained to be _officers and gentlemen_ by the time they
are grown up.

Nor is it the money barrier alone which excludes them. An exclusive
system of nomination is distasteful, if not alien, to the democratic
sentiment. Combined with the cost of the subsequent training, our
present system absolutely excludes all but a very small fraction of
the population from serving the King as naval officers. It admits the
duke’s son if he is fit, but it excludes the cook’s son whether he
is fit or not. It ought to admit both, _but only if both are fit_.
The cook’s son may not often be fit, but when he is, why exclude him?
Brains, character, and manners are not the exclusive endowment of those
whose parents can afford to spend £1,000 on their education.

There seems to be only one way of solving this problem. Initial
fitness must be secured, as at present, by careful selection at the
outset, and if the promise is not fulfilled as time goes on, ruthless
exclusion, whether of duke’s son or of cook’s son, must be the
inflexible rule. But do not exclude for poverty alone, either at the
outset or afterwards. Let every fit boy have his chance, irrespective
of the depth of his parents’ purse. This might, of course, be done
by a liberal system of reduced fees for cadets, midshipmen, and
sub-lieutenants whose parents were in poor circumstances. But in the
first place there would be a certain element of invidiousness in the
selection of the recipients of the national bounty, and, in the second,
mischievous class distinctions would inevitably arise among the cadets
themselves--between those who were supported wholly or partially by
the State and those who were not. It is most essential that there
should be no such distinctions--that the cadets should be taught
to look up only to those who are eminent in brains, character, and
manners, and to look down only on those who are idle, vicious, vulgar,
or incorrigibly stupid. Now, a common maintenance by the State would
put them all on a common level of equality. Though the additional cost
to the State would doubtless be great, the result would be well worth
the extra expenditure.

The quarter of a million sterling required would be lost and
unnoticeable in the millions of the Education Vote, yet it would be
worth all the millions of the Education Vote if it makes the Navy more
efficient, because

            _The British Nation Floats on the British Navy._

It would put the Navy once for all on a basis as broad as the nation;
it would immeasurably widen the area of selection, and place at the
disposal of the Admiralty all the intellect and all the character of
all classes of the people.


THE NEW NAVAL EDUCATION.

Masts and sails disappeared irretrievably with the demand for high
speed.

Now, what went with them? Why! The education that the sole use of sail
power gave to the eye, brain, and body, in battling with the elements!

It was a marvellous education which we had in the pure sailing days!

One was alert by instinct! You never knew what might happen! A
topsail-sheet carrying away, or a weather brace going, or a sudden
shift of wind, or squall!

One thus got habituated to being quick and resourceful, and it was more
or less a slur and a stigma not to be so! _Also_ (_as Officer of the
Watch_) _men’s lives were in your hands!_ For instance with men on the
yards, and any lubberly stupidity with braces or helm!

Both for Officers and Men then we no longer have this magnificent
education by _the Elements_!

Steam has practically annihilated the wind and the sea!

What are we to do to get the same ready and resourceful qualities by
other methods?

The answer is: The Gymnasium, Boat Sailing, the Destroyer, the
Submarine, and the Engine Room.

Apparently, we are in this country in the infancy of Gymnastics for
the training of the body when one reads of the Swedish system and its
results. (“_Mens sana in corpore sano._”)

The one solitary element in which we are behind, and must be behind all
nations, is “Men.” We have no Conscription with the unlimited resources
it gives! How should we counterbalance this want? “By introducing every
possible form of labour-saving appliance,” regardless of cost, weight,
and space; for instance, is it really impossible to devise mechanical
arrangements for feeding the fires with coal instead of using the mass
of men we now are obliged to employ for the purpose? The coal is got
out of the bunkers in the same way now as in the first steamship ever
built. It is not only we thereby save men--we ensure success (for the
next Naval War will be largely a question of physical endurance and
nerves).

“A machine has no nerves and doesn’t tire!”

The other point necessary to consider is “not to waste educated labour,
and to utilise and cultivate specialities!”

The present system of education both of Men and Officers is that we all
go in at one end like the pigs of every type at Chicago, and come out a
uniform pattern of sausages at the other!

Thus, what we want is, above all things, a “Corps d’Elite” of
gun-firers! I should call them the “Bull’s Eye Party” (and give them
all 10_s._ a day extra pay!)

They must do nothing else but practise hitting the target and lose
their pay when they don’t!

Where would your violin player be if he didn’t daily practise? And if
you made him pick oakum, where would his touch be?

This is what Paganini said: “The first day I omit to practise the
violin I notice it myself!

“The second day my friends notice it!!

“The third day the public notice it!!!”

But if the “Bull’s Eye Party” are to hit the enemy as desired (and as
they can be made competent to do!) then the Admirals and Captains, and
all others, must equally play their parts to allow the “Bull’s Eye
Party” to get within range and sight of the enemy. _Their_ education
is therefore equally important. Scripture comes in here appropriately,
“The eye cannot say to the hand, nor the hand to the foot,” etc., etc.

To put the matter very briefly:

“The education of all our Officers, without distinction, must be
remodelled to cope with machinery, instead of sails!”

The Gymnasium, the Engine-room, the Destroyer, the Submarine, and Boat
Sailing must be our great educational instruments.

Not for a single moment is it put forward that a year in a workshop and
a year in an engine-room will make an efficient Engineer Officer! It is
long experience in such work that does that!--as in every other thing!
But in a small way, the argument of the abolition of the old Navigating
Class applies here very forcibly. It was said their abolition would be
absolutely fatal to the efficient navigation of the Fleet.

But what has been the result? There have been fewer cases of bad
navigation since the old Navigating Class was done away with than in
the whole history of the Navy! And with this immense gain--that the
knowledge of navigation is now widely diffused through the Fleet.

One can suppose cases where it would be of the utmost value to us were
engineering knowledge and the handling of mechanical appliances more
widely diffused amongst our Officers!

But that is not _the vital point_! _The vital point_ is that were a
Midshipman to be continuously serving in the engine-room of Destroyers
and larger vessels (continuously under weigh) at high speeds, he would
get a training assimilating in its nature to that marvellous training
of the old sailing days, which kept the wits of Officer of the Watch
in the utmost state of tension, and produced the splendid specimens of
readiness and resource which we read of in the sea Officers of Nelson’s
time and later!

TRAINING OF BOYS: No masts and sails--Gymnasium--Rifle and
gun practice--Boat sailing--Little or no school. (No Binomial
Theorem)--Destroyer work for sea-sickness--Sent straight from
training-ships to hot foreign stations on the hot-house principle
before bedding-out--Select from the very beginning the good shots and
the smart signalmen and train them specially.

TRAINING OF THE MEN: Re-model instruction in Gunnery and Torpedo
Schools--“Corps d’Elite” of three classes of (1) gun firers or
“Marksmen”; (2) gun loaders; (3) gun manipulators--From the time the
boy enters the Navy in the training-ship till he gets his pension, the
sole object to be to select, train, and improve and retain “the good
shot,” and all training subordinated to this!

TRAINING OF OFFICERS: Return to early entry at 12 years of age--A
much lower standard of entrance, educational examination, and a
high standard of physical entrance examination--Colloquial French
obligatory, no grammar, and no other language, dead or alive!--A
combined course of “Britannia” and “Keyham” Colleges with at least two
years of engine-room and shop work and Destroyer practice.

These great changes are not fanciful ideas!

The stubborn fact that we cannot provide what is required on the
present system forces the change both as regards Officers as well as
Men and Boys.


NAVAL OFFICERS’ TRAINING.

_Some Opinions on the Admiralty Scheme_ (1902).


1. ADMIRAL LORD CHARLES BERESFORD.

In 1902 Lord Charles Beresford, in an interview on the then recent
Admiralty memorandum on the subject of the entry, training, and
employment of officers and men of the Royal Navy, said:--

    “The strongest opponent of the scheme will acknowledge that
    it is a brilliant and statesmanlike effort to grapple with _a
    problem upon the sound settlement of which depends the future
    efficiency of the British Navy_. To-day the commander of fleets
    must possess a greater combination of characteristics than
    has ever before been required of him. He must not only be a
    born leader of men, but he must have the practical scientific
    training which the development of mechanical invention renders
    an absolute and indispensable essential. The executive officer
    of to-day should possess an intimate knowledge of all that
    relates to his profession. Up to now he has been fairly
    educated in the different branches. The most important,
    however--in that we depend entirely upon it--that relating
    to steam and machinery, has been sadly neglected. The duties
    of this branch have been delegated to, and well and loyally
    performed by, a body of officers existing for this special
    purpose, and there have been two results. _The executive
    officer has remained ignorant of one of the most important
    parts of his profession; the engineer officer has never
    received that recognition to which the importance of his duties
    and responsibilities so justly entitled him._ The Board of
    Admiralty have now unanimously approved a plan which provides
    that naval officers shall have an opportunity of adding
    to their professional attainments the essential knowledge
    of marine engineering. Further than this, the Board have
    recognised that the present status of naval engineer officers
    could not continue, in fairness either to themselves or to the
    Service. _The abolition of distinction regarding entry has
    settled this point once and for ever, and it is satisfactory to
    find that constituted authority has taken the matter in hand
    before it became a political or party question._

    “There seems to be a doubt as to whether it will be possible
    under the new scheme for an executive officer to have the
    knowledge he should possess of marine engineering. There is no
    cast-iron secret or mystery with regard to marine engineering,
    as some seem to imagine. This being so, there is no reason why
    lieutenants (E.) should not be just as good and useful experts
    in their speciality as the gunnery, torpedo, or navigating
    lieutenant of the present day, without in the slightest degree
    detracting from their ability to become excellent executive
    officers. It is imperative that all officers of the present day
    should be well acquainted with all the general duties connected
    with the management of ships and fleets. The wider and fuller
    the education the naval officer receives in matters relating to
    science within his own profession, the more likely the Service
    is to produce men who will be capable of seeing that the fleet
    in its entirety is perfect for its work, and that there is no
    weak link in the chain that may jeopardise the whole.

    “The memo, referring to the marines will be, I believe,
    received with the greatest satisfaction by that splendid
    corps as a whole as by the Service as a whole. _It is a marvel
    that the zeal and ability of the officers of the Royal Marines
    has not been effectively utilised long ago._ Many important
    positions will now be open to them, and _they will feel that
    they are taking a real part in the executive working of the
    ship and fleet which is so proud to own them as a component
    part_. It is to be hoped the way will now be open to give them
    appointments as general officers commanding at many of the
    naval bases. No part of the scheme will give the Service in its
    entirety more sincere pleasure than the improvements promised
    with regard to the position of the warrant officers. Promotion
    of warrant officers to lieutenant’s rank has long been urged
    by those who argued that the lower deck were fully entitled
    to a right that had from time immemorial been engaged by the
    non-commissioned ranks of the sister Service. Placing the
    signal ratings on an equality with gunnery and torpedo ratings
    is of far more importance than is generally realised. The vital
    necessity of a good line of communication and good signalmen
    has never been thoroughly appreciated.

    “_I consider the return to the early age of entry of infinite
    value._ It has not yet been decided whether on first going
    to sea midshipmen will be appointed to ships ordinarily in
    commission or to ships specially in commission for training
    purposes. I am strongly of opinion that it would be by far the
    best plan to send them to learn their duties in the ordinary
    ships of the regularly commissioned fleet. With regard to the
    proposed arrangement of nomination to branches, I consider it
    a fair contract, and it keeps the power of appointment to the
    various branches in the hands of the constituted authorities.
    In my opinion this gives the best young officer the fairest
    chance of holding the best positions.

    “In conclusion, I am of the opinion that the plan is one that
    has been thoroughly matured and well thought out, and I believe
    that when its details have been definitely settled it will
    make more complete the well-being, contentment, and efficiency
    of that Service on which the safety of the empire absolutely
    depends.”


2. SIR JOHN HOPKINS.

I succeeded Admiral Sir John Hopkins, one of the most distinguished
Officers in the Navy, in seven different appointments--as Head of
the Gunnery School at Portsmouth, as Director of Naval Ordnance at
the Admiralty, as Admiral Superintendent of Portsmouth Dockyard, as
Controller of the Navy, as 3rd Sea Lord, as Commander-in-Chief in
North America, and as Commander-in-Chief in the Mediterranean. In each
of these appointments force of circumstances compelled me to have a
revolution. So the following spontaneous letter, which he wrote me long
after, is the more gratifying and shows his magnanimity:

                                   GREATBRIDGE, ROMSEY,
                                                 _16th April, 1906_.

    MY DEAR FISHER,

    There is a small band of writing critics “making mouths and
    ceasing not” at the Education Scheme; but let them not trouble
    you. The wonder will be in twenty years’ time how such a bold
    forecast could have been made, that produced such excellent
    results; and, in my opinion, the “Common Entry” man will be as
    great a success as the best friends of the Service could wish.

                                   Believe me,
                                         Sincerely yours,
                                             (Signed) J. O. HOPKINS.


3. CHIEF INSPECTOR OF MACHINERY, SIR HENRY BENBOW, K.C.B., D.S.O., R.N.

                                 HABESHI, DORMAN’S PARK,
                                               SURREY,
                                                 _20th April, 1908_.

    DEAR SIR,

    Permit me to congratulate you on the success of the new
    system of Entry and Education of Naval Cadets, which has
    always elicited my warmest sympathy as the only means of
    doing away with class prejudice. A relative and namesake of
    mine, a Lieutenant in the Service, only the other day spoke
    to me most highly of the mental and physical development of
    the present-day Cadets, and remarked how very favourably they
    compared with the Cadets entered under the old _régime_.

                                           I remain, dear Sir,
                                               Yours faithfully,
                                                       HENRY BENBOW.

  Admiral of the Fleet
      Sir JOHN FISHER, G.C.B., O.M.


A NAVAL CANDIDATE’S ESSAY.

I give here an essay written on 20th February, 1908, by a candidate for
entry at Osborne as a Naval Cadet. His age was 12½; his height four
foot nothing. The subjects were suddenly set to the candidates by the
Interview Committee, and they were allowed only ten minutes to write
the essay in. The original of this essay I sent to King Edward.

    _What Nation ought we to protect ourselves most against--and
    why?_

    “In my opinion we should protect ourselves most against Germany.

    “The most important reason is that they have the second
    largest Navy in the world; to which (their Navy) they are
    rapidly adding. They are also building three ships equal to
    our ‘Dreadnought.’ Their Army also is very formidable; though
    they are suffering from flat-feet. It is also rumoured that the
    present German Emperor has a feud against King Edward; namely,
    when they were young, King Edward punched the German Emperor’s
    head; how far that is true, I don’t know.

    “I always think that Englishmen and Germans are, more or less,
    natural enemies. One of the reasons for this is, I think,
    that Englishmen and Germans are so different; for most of the
    Germans I’ve met in Switzerland were not quarter so energetic
    as our English friends. They (the Germans) would never go
    much above the snow line. Also I think we rather despise the
    Germans, because of their habit of eating a lot. The Germans
    also would like a few of our possessions.”




CHAPTER XI

SUBMARINES


I begin this chapter with a letter written to me on April 18th, 1918,
by Colonel Sir Maurice Hankey, Secretary to the War Cabinet:--

    MY DEAR LORD FISHER,

    Last night I dined with Lord Esher. He showed me letters of
    yours dated 1904 describing in detail the German Submarine
    Campaign of 1917. It is the most amazing thing I have ever
    read; not one letter only, but several.

    Also some astonishing remarks of yours about the Generals
    who ought to man the War Office in case of war. All men who
    have come to the top were your nominees. Finally, General
    Plumer (whom few people knew about) you picked out for
    Quartermaster-General, with this remark: “Every vote against
    Plumer is a vote for paper boots and insufficient shells!”[8]

    Priceless, the whole thing! Neck-busy though I am, I have
    come to the Office early to pay this tribute of my undying
    admiration, and to beg you to get hold of these astounding
    documents for your Memoirs. But anyhow, they will appear in
    Lord Esher’s Memoirs, I suppose.

                                                   Yours ever,
                                           (Signed) M. P. A. HANKEY.

Now follows a letter which I wrote to a High Official in 1904, and
which I had forgotten, until I came across it recently. It’s somewhat
violent, but so true that I insert it. I went as First Sea Lord of the
Admiralty shortly after--very unexpectedly--and so was able to give
effect (though surreptitiously) to my convictions. Not only Admirals
afloat, but even Politicians ashore, dubbed submarines as “playthings,”
so the money had to be got by subterfuge (as I have explained in
Chapter V. of my “Memories”).

                                               ADMIRALTY HOUSE,
                                                            PORTMOUTH.
                                                 _April 20th, 1904._

    MY DEAR FRIEND,

    I will begin with the last thing in your letter, which is far
    the most important, and that is our paucity of submarines. I
    consider it the most serious thing at present affecting the
    British Empire!--That sounds _big_, but it’s true. Had either
    the Russians or the Japanese had submarines the whole face of
    their war would have been changed for both sides. It really
    makes me laugh to read of “Admiral Togo’s _eighth_ attack on
    Port Arthur!” Why! had he possessed submarines it would have
    been _one_ attack and _one_ attack only! It would have been
    all over with the whole Russian Fleet, caught like rats in a
    trap! Similarly, the Japanese Admiral Togo outside would never
    have dared to let his transports full of troops pursue the even
    tenor of their way to Chemulpo and elsewhere!

    It’s astounding to me, _perfectly astounding_, how the very
    best amongst us absolutely fail to realise the vast impending
    revolution in naval warfare and naval strategy that the
    submarine will accomplish! (I have written a paper on this,
    but it’s so violent I am keeping it!) Here, just to take a
    simple instance, is the battleship “Empress of India,” engaged
    in manœuvres and knowing of the proximity of Submarines, the
    Flagship of the Second Admiral of the Home Fleet nine miles
    beyond the Nab Light (out in the open sea), so self-confident
    of safety and so oblivious of the possibilities of modern
    warfare that the Admiral is smoking his cigarette, the Captain
    is calmly seeing defaulters down on the half-deck, no one
    caring an iota for what is going on, and suddenly they see
    a Whitehead torpedo miss their stern by a few feet! And how
    fired? From a submarine of the “pre-Adamite” period, small,
    slow, badly fitted, _with no periscope at all_--it had been
    carried away by a destroyer lying over her, fishing for
    her!--and yet this submarine followed that battleship for a
    solid two hours under water, coming up gingerly about a mile
    off, every now and then (like a beaver!), just to take a fresh
    compass bearing of her prey, and then down again!

    Remember, that this is done (and I want specially to emphasise
    the point), with the Lieutenant in command of the boat out in
    her for the first time in his life on his own account, and half
    the crew never out before either! why, it’s wonderful! And so
    what results may we expect with bigger and faster boats and
    periscopes more powerful than the naked eye (such as the latest
    pattern one I saw the other day), and with experienced officers
    and crews, and with nests of these submarines acting together?

    I have not disguised my opinion in season and out of season
    as to the essential, imperative, immediate, vital, pressing,
    urgent (I can’t think of any more adjectives!) necessity for
    more submarines at once, at the very least 25 in addition to
    those now ordered and building, and a hundred more as soon as
    practicable, or we shall be caught with our breeches down just
    as the Russians have been!

    And then, my dear Friend, you have the astounding audacity to
    say to me, “I presume you only think they (the submarines) can
    act on the _defensive_!”... Why, my dear fellow! not take the
    offensive? Good Lord! if our Admiral is worth his salt, he
    will tow his submarines at 18 knots speed and put them into
    the hostile Port (like ferrets after the rabbits!) before war
    is officially declared, just as the Japanese acted before the
    Russian Naval Officers knew that war was declared!

    In all seriousness I don’t think it is even _faintly_ realised--

    _The immense impending revolution which the submarines will
    effect as offensive weapons of war._

When you calmly sit down and work out what will happen in the narrow
waters of the Channel and the Mediterranean--how totally the submarines
will alter the effect of Gibraltar, Port Said, Lemnos, and Malta, it
makes one’s hair stand on end!

I hope you don’t think this letter too personal!

                                                   Ever yours,
                                                           J. A. FISHER.

Note made on January 5th, 1904:

Satan disguised as an Angel of Light wouldn’t succeed in persuading the
Admiralty or the Navy that in the course of some few years Submarines
will prevent any Fleet remaining at sea continuously either in the
Mediterranean or the English Channel.

[Illustration: SOME SHELLS FOR 18-INCH GUNS.

The shells for the 20-inch guns to be carried by H.M.S. “Incomparable”
would have been far bigger, and would have weighed two tons.]

Now follows a paper on “The Effect of Submarine Boats,” which I wrote
while I was Commander-in-Chief at Portsmouth, October, 1903.

_These remarks can only be fully appreciated by those who witnessed the
Flotilla of Submarine Boats now at Portsmouth practising out in the
open sea._

    It is an historical fact that the British Navy stubbornly
    resists change.

    A First Sea Lord told me on one occasion that there were no
    torpedoes when he came to sea, and he didn’t see why the devil
    there should be any of the beastly things now!

    This was _à propos_ of my attracting the attention of his
    serene and contented mind to the fact that we hadn’t got any
    torpedoes at that time in the British Navy, and that a certain
    Mr. Whitehead (with whom I was acquainted) had devised an
    automobile torpedo, costing only £500, that would make a hole
    as big as his Lordship’s carriage (then standing at the door)
    in the bottom of the strongest and biggest ship in the world,
    and she would go to the bottom in about five minutes.

    Thirty-five years after this last interview, on September 4th,
    1903, at 11 a.m., the ironclad “Belleisle,” having had several
    extra bottoms put on her and strengthened in every conceivable
    manner that science could suggest or money accomplish, was sent
    to the bottom of Portsmouth Harbour by this very Whitehead
    automobile torpedo in seven minutes.

    This Whitehead torpedo can be carried with facility in
    Submarine Boats, and it has now attained such a range and such
    accuracy (due to the marvellous adaptation of the gyroscope),
    that even at two miles’ range it possesses a greater ratio
    of power of vitally injuring a ship in the line of battle
    than does the most accurate gun. This is capable of easy
    demonstration (if anyone doubts it).

    There is this immense fundamental difference between the
    automobile torpedo and the gun--the torpedo has no trajectory:
    it travels horizontally and hits below water, so all its hits
    are vital hits; but not so the gun--only in a few places
    are gun hits vital, and those places are armoured. It is
    not feasible to armour the bottoms of ships even if it were
    effectual--which it is not.

    But the pith and marrow of the whole matter lies in the fact
    that the Submarine Boat which carries this automobile torpedo
    is up to the present date absolutely unattackable. When you see
    Battleships or Cruisers, or Destroyers, or Torpedo Boats on
    the horizon, you can send others after them to attack them or
    drive them away! You see them--you can fire at them--you can
    avoid them--you can chase them--but with the Submarine Boat
    you can do nothing! You can’t fight them with other Submarine
    Boats--they can’t see each other!

    Now for the practical bearing of all this, and the special
    manner it affects the Submarine Boat and the Army and the
    Navy--for they are all inextricably mixed up together in this
    matter:--

    As regards the Navy, it must revolutionise Naval Tactics for
    this simple reason--that the present battle formation of
    ships in a single line presents a target of such a length
    that the chances are altogether in favour of the Whitehead
    torpedo hitting some ship in the line even when projected
    from a distance of several miles. This applies specially to
    its use by the Submarine Boat; but in addition, these boats
    can, in operating defensively, come with absolute invisibility
    within a few hundred yards to discharge the projectile, not at
    random amongst the crowd of vessels but with certainty at the
    Admiral’s ship for instance, or at any other specific vessel
    desired to be sent to the bottom.

    It affects the Army, because, imagine even one Submarine Boat
    with a flock of transports in sight loaded each with some
    two or three thousand troops! Imagine the effect of one such
    transport going to the bottom in a few seconds with its living
    freight!

    Even the bare thought makes invasion impossible! Fancy 100,000
    helpless, huddled up troops afloat in frightened transports
    with these invisible demons known to be near.

    Death
    near--momentarily--sudden--awful--invisible--unavoidable!
    Nothing conceivable more demoralising!

    It affects the existence of the Empire, because just as we
    were in peril by the non-adoption of the breech-loading gun
    until after every Foreign nation had it, and just as we were
    in peril when Napoleon the Third built “La Gloire” and other
    French ironclads, while we were still stubbornly building
    wooden three-deckers, and just as we were in peril when, before
    the Boer War, we were waiting to perfect our ammunition and in
    consequence had practically no ammunition at all, so are we
    in peril now by only having 20 per cent. of our very minimum
    requirements in Submarine Boats, because we are waiting for
    perfection! We forget that “half a loaf is better than no
    bread”--we strain at the gnat of perfection and swallow the
    camel of unreadiness! We shall be found unready once too often!

In 1918 I wrote the following letter to a friend on “Submarines and Oil
Fuel.”

    You ask for information in regard to a prophecy I made before
    the War in relation to Submarines, because, you say, that my
    statement made in 1912 that Submarines would utterly change
    Naval Warfare is now making a stir. However, I made that same
    statement in 1904, fourteen years ago.

    I will endeavour to give you a brief, but succinct, synopsis of
    the whole matter. I have to go some way back, but as you quite
    correctly surmise the culmination of my beliefs since 1902 was
    the paper on Submarine Warfare which I prepared six months
    before the War.[9]...

    In May, 1912 (I am working backwards), Mr. Asquith, the Prime
    Minister, and Mr. Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, came
    to Naples, where I then was, and I was invited to be Chairman
    of a Royal Commission on Oil Fuel for the Navy, and on Oil
    Engines. What most moved me to acceptance was to push the
    Submarine, because oil and the oil engine had a special bearing
    on its development.

    Continuing my march backwards in regard to the Submarine,
    there was a cessation in the development of the Submarine
    after I left the Admiralty as First Sea Lord on January 25th,
    1910. When I returned as First Sea Lord to the Admiralty in
    October, 1914, there were fewer Submarines than when I left the
    Admiralty in January, 1910, and the one man incomparably fitted
    to develop the Submarine had been cast away in a third-class
    Cruiser stationed in Crete. No wonder! An Admiral, holding a
    very high appointment afloat, derided Submarines as playthings!

    In one set of manœuvres the young officer commanding a
    Submarine, having for the third time successfully torpedoed
    the hostile Admiral’s Flagship, humbly said so to the Admiral
    by signal, and suggested the Flagship going out of action. The
    answer he got back by signal from the Admiral was: “You be
    damned!”

    I am still going on tracing back the Submarine. In 1907,
    King Edward went on board the “Dreadnought” for a cruise and
    witnessed the manœuvres of a Submarine Flotilla. I then said
    to His Majesty: “The Submarine will be the Battleship of the
    future!”

    In February, 1904, Admiral Count Montecuccoli, the Austrian
    Minister of Marine, invited himself to stay with me at
    Portsmouth, where I was then Commander-in-Chief. He had been
    Commander-in-Chief of the Austrian Navy at Pola when I was
    Commander-in-Chief in the Mediterranean. We became very great
    friends out there. The Austrian Fleet gave us a most cordial
    reception. He also was an ardent believer in the Submarine.
    That’s why he invited himself to stay, but I refused to let him
    see our Submarines at Portsmouth, which were then advancing
    by leaps and bounds. Admiral Bacon was then the admirable
    Captain in charge of Submarines, and he did more to develop the
    Submarine than anyone living. The Submarine is not the weapon
    of the weak. Had it only been properly used and developed,
    it’s the weapon of the strong, if you use your Naval Supremacy
    properly, and

    _seize the exits of the enemy, and make a blockade effectual by
    Submarines and Mines, which our predominant and overwhelming
    naval superiority renders feasible_.

All that was required to meet a German Submarine Menace was the
possession of Antwerp, the Belgian Coast, and the Baltic. We could
quite easily have accomplished these three objects.

Nearly three months before the War, before the meeting of the Committee
of Imperial Defence held on May 14th, 1914, I sent the Prime Minister
the following Memorandum which I had written in the previous January;
and added:--


THE SUBMARINE IS THE COMING TYPE OF WAR VESSEL FOR SEA FIGHTING.

    But for that consummation to be reached we must perfect the oil
    engine and we must store oil.

    There is a strong animus against the submarine--of course there
    is!

    An ancient Admiralty Board minute described the introduction of
    the steam engine as fatal to England’s Navy.

    Another Admiralty Board minute vetoed iron ships, because iron
    sinks and wood floats!

    The whole Navy objected to breech-loading guns, and in
    consequence sure disaster was close to us for years and years.

    There was virulent opposition to the water-tube boiler (fancy
    putting the fire where the water ought to be, and the water
    where the fire should be!)

    The turbine was said by eminent marine engineers to have an
    “insuperable and vital defect which renders it inadmissible as
    a practical marine engine--its vast number of blades--it is
    only a toy.” 80 per cent. of the steam-power of the world is
    now driving turbines.

    Wireless was voted damnable by all the armchair sailors when we
    put it on the roof of the Admiralty, and yet we heard what one
    ship (the “Argyll”) at Bombay was saying to another (the “Black
    Prince”) at Gibraltar.

    “Flying machines are a physical impossibility,” said a very
    great scientist four years ago. To-day they are as plentiful as
    sparrows.

    “Submarines are only playthings!” was the official remark of
    our Chief Admiral afloat only a little while ago, and yet now
    submarines are talked of as presently ousting Dreadnoughts.

    The above texts, extracted from comparatively modern naval
    history (history is a record of exploded ideas!), should make
    anyone chary of ridiculing the writer when he repeats:

    THE SUBMARINE IS THE COMING TYPE OF WAR VESSEL FOR SEA FIGHTING.

    And what is it that the coming of the submarine really means?
    It means that the whole foundation of our traditional naval
    strategy, which served us so well in the past, has been broken
    down! The foundation of that strategy was blockade. The Fleet
    did not exist merely to win battles--that was the means, not
    the end. The ultimate purpose of the Fleet was to make blockade
    possible for us and impossible for our enemy. Where that
    situation was set up we could do what we liked with him on the
    sea, and, despite a state of war, England grew steadily richer.
    But with the advent of the long-range ocean-going submarine
    that has all gone! Surface ships can no longer either maintain
    or prevent blockade, and with the conception of blockade are
    broken up all the consequences, direct and indirect, that used
    to flow from it. All our old ideas of strategy are simmering in
    the melting pot! Can we get anything out of it which will let
    us know where we are and restore to us something of our former
    grip? It is a question that must be faced.

       *       *       *       *       *

    Sea-fighting of to-day, or at any time, entails the removal of
    the enemy’s sea forces. If, as is maintained, the submarine
    proves itself at once the most efficient factor for this
    purpose and also the most difficult sea force to remove, let us
    clear our minds of all previous obsessions and acknowledge the
    facts once and for all.


HOSTILE SUBMARINES.

    _It has to be freely acknowledged that at the present time no
    means exist of preventing hostile submarines emerging from
    their own ports and cruising more or less at will._

    It is, moreover, only barely possible that, in the future,
    mining and other blocking operations on a very extensive scale
    may so develop as to render their exit very hazardous; but it
    is plain that such operations would require a large personnel,
    unceasing energy and vigilance, and an immense quantity of
    constantly replaceable materials.

       *       *       *       *       *

THE SUBMARINE AND COMMERCE.

    Again, the question arises as to what a submarine can do
    against a merchant ship when she has found her. She cannot
    capture the merchant ship; she has no spare hands to put a
    prize crew on board; little or nothing would be gained by
    disabling her engines or propeller; she cannot convoy her
    into harbour; and, in fact, it is impossible for the submarine
    to deal with commerce in the light and provisions of accepted
    international law. Under these circumstances, is it presumed
    that the hostile submarine will disregard such law and sink
    any vessel heading for a British commercial port and certainly
    those that are armed or carrying contraband?

    There is nothing else the submarine can do except sink her
    capture, and it must therefore be admitted that (provided it
    is done, and however inhuman and barbarous it may appear) this
    submarine menace is a truly terrible one for British commerce
    and Great Britain alike, for no means can be suggested at
    present of meeting it except by reprisals. All that would
    be known would be that a certain ship and her crew had
    disappeared, or some of her boats would be picked up with a few
    survivors to tell the tale. Such a tale would fill the world
    with horror, and it is freely acknowledged to be an altogether
    barbarous method of warfare; but, again, if it is done by the
    Germans the only thing would be to make reprisals. The essence
    of war is violence, and moderation in war is imbecility.

    It has been suggested that it should be obligatory for a
    submarine to fire a warning gun, but is such a proceeding
    practical? We must bear in mind that modern submarines are
    faster on the surface than the majority of merchantmen, and
    will not necessarily need to dive at all. Therefore, as the
    submarine would in most cases be sighted, and as she has no
    prize crew to put on board, the warning gun is useless, as the
    only thing the submarine could do would be to sink the enemy;
    also, the apparently harmless merchant vessel may be armed, in
    which case the submarine may but have given herself away if she
    did not sink her.

    The subject is, indeed, one that bristles with great
    difficulties, and it is highly desirable that the conduct
    of submarines in molesting commerce should be thoroughly
    considered. Above all, it is one of overwhelming interest to
    neutrals. One flag is very much like another seen against the
    light through a periscope, should he have thought it necessary
    to dive; and the fear is natural that the only thing the
    officer of the hostile submarine would make sure of would be
    that the flag seen was not that of his own country.

    Moreover, under numerous circumstances can a submarine allow
    a merchant ship to pass unmolested? Harmless trader in
    appearance, in reality she may be one of the numerous fleet
    auxiliaries, a mine-layer, or carrying troops, and so on. Can
    the submarine come to the surface to inquire and lose all
    chance of attack if the vessel should prove to be faster than
    she is? The apparent merchant ship may also be armed. In this
    light, indeed, the recent arming of our British merchantmen is
    unfortunate, for it gives the hostile submarine an excellent
    excuse (if she needs one) for sinking them; namely, that of
    self-defence against the guns of the merchant ship.

    What can be the answer to all the foregoing but that (barbarous
    and inhuman as, we again repeat, it may appear), if the
    submarine is used at all against commerce, she must sink her
    captures?

    For the prevention of submarines preying on our commerce, it is
    above all necessary that merchant shipping should take every
    advantage of our favourable geographical position, and that we
    should make the Straits of Dover as difficult as we possibly
    can.

    It is not proposed here to enter into the technical details of
    such arrangements; but even after every conceivable means has
    been taken, it must be conceded that there is at least a chance
    of submarines passing safely through; while at night, or in
    thick weather, it is probable that they would not fail to pass
    in safety.

I conclude with some details of British Submarines before and during
the War:--

    I. When I left the Admiralty in January, 1910:
           Submarines ready for fighting                        61
           Building and on order                                13

   II. When I returned to the Admiralty, in October, 1914, as First Sea
         Lord:
           Submarines fit for fighting                          53
           Building and on order                                21
         But of these 21, only 5 were any good!
         2 were paid off as useless.
         3 sold to the Italians, not of use to us.
         4 sold to the French, not of use to us.
         7 of unsatisfactory design.
        --
        16 leaving only 5 of oversea modern (“E”) Type.
        --

Nominally, there were 77 Submarines when I returned in October, 1914,
but out of these 24 were useless, or had gone to the Antipodes, as
follows:

         2 to Australia.
         3 to Hong Kong.
         1 sold to Italy useless.
         8 “A” Class scrapped, 10 years old.
        10 “B” Class scrapped, 9 years old.
        --
        24

77 - 24 = 53 total Submarines fit for Service when I returned in
October, 1914.

There were 61 Submarines efficient when I left the Admiralty in
January, 1910.

Of those that were on order when I returned, 14 were of “G” Class,
but were of an experimental type, and so were not ready till _June,
1916_, or one year after the Submarines were ready which I ordered on
my return to the Admiralty in October, 1914.

Here may be stated the great service rendered by Mr. Schwab, of the
Bethlehem Steel Works. I specially sent for him. I told him the very
shortest time hitherto that a Submarine had been built in was 14
months. Would he use his best endeavours to deliver in six months? _He
delivered the first batch in five months!_ And not only that, but they
were of so efficient a type (“H” Class) that they came from America to
the Dardanelles without escort, and were of inestimable service out
there, and passed into the Sea of Marmora, and were most effective in
sinking Turkish Transports bringing munitions to Gallipoli.

The type of Submarine (“H” Class) he built hold the field for their
special attributes. I saw one in dock at Harwich that had been rammed
by a Destroyer--I think a German Destroyer--and had the forepart of her
taken clean away, and she got back to Harwich by herself all right. The
Commander of her, an aged man, was in the Merchant Service. (What a
lot we do indeed owe to the Merchant Service, and especially to those
wonderful men in the Trawlers!)

But Mr. Schwab did far more than what I have narrated above. He
undertook the delivery of a very important portion of the armament of
the Monitors.

The idea was followed up in making old Cruisers immune from German
Submarines--the “Grafton,” an old type Cruiser (and so also the
“Edgar”), thus fitted, was hit fair amidships by a torpedo from a
German submarine off Gibraltar, and the Captain of the “Grafton”
reported himself unhurt and going all the faster for it (as it had
blown off a good bit of the hull!), and those vessels were ever so much
the better sea boats for it!

It is lamentable that no heed was given to the great sagacity of Mr.
Churchill in his special endeavour to give further application to this
invention.

In the Submarine Monitor M1, which carries a 12-inch gun, and which is
illustrated in this volume, we have the type of vessel I put before the
Admiralty in August, 1915. She is the forerunner of the Battleship of
the future; but her successors should be built in a much shorter time
than she was.




CHAPTER XII

NOTES ON OIL AND OIL ENGINES

_How War and Peaceful Commerce will be Revolutionised by the Oil
Engine._


On September 17th, 1912, at 3 a.m., I invited two very eminent experts,
Sir Trevor Dawson and his coadjutor McKechnie, to leave their beds and
come into my room to see an outline of the Fast Ship of the Future,
both for War and Commerce, carrying sufficient fuel to go round the
Earth with and with an increased capacity of 30 per cent. as compared
with similar vessels of the same displacement using steam. At length a
special Government Research Department has been set up to develop the
Oil Engine, and a sum prohibitive in peace time has been cheerfully
accorded by War reasoning to set up this establishment on a big
basis. I reiterate what is said elsewhere, that the Oil Engine will
revolutionise both War and Commerce when once it is perfected--through
the enormous gain it affords in space and smaller crews through
riddance of stokeholds and firemen, and facility of re-fuelling and
cleanliness and absence of funnels, etc., etc.

Here is a descriptive outline of H.M.S. “Incomparable,” as set forth in
the early morning of September 17th, 1912:

Really a Gem! She can be riddled and gutted outside the Central
Diamond-shaped Armoured Citadel because nothing vital outside that
Citadel! So lightly built she’ll weigh so little as to go Fast, with a
hundred and fifty thousand horse power! She’ll shake to pieces in about
10 years! What’s the good of a warship lasting longer? The d--d things
get obsolete in about a year!

Ten 16-inch guns to begin with (afterwards 20-inch guns) for main
armament.

Eight broadside Torpedo Tubes (21-inch Torpedo).

32 knots speed at least.

16-inch armour on citadel and belt amidships, thinning towards the end.

850 feet long--to be afterwards 1,000 feet; 86 feet wide.

Four Torpedo Tubes each side to be well before the Citadel (submerged
Tubes) so as not to interfere with machinery space.

Quadruple screws.

Anti-Submarine guns in small single turrets.

A Turtle-backed armoured hull, with light steel uninflammable structure
before and abaft the armoured Diamond-shaped Citadel.

Two Conning Towers.

Hydraulic crane each side (very low in height) for lifting boats.

The light central steel hollow mast only for wireless and for
ventilation, made of steel ribbon to wind up and down at will.

Jam up the Citadel all that is possible right in centre of Hull, and
squeeze the last inch in space so as to lessen amount of 16-inch armour.

Curved thick armour deck.

Ammunition service by Hydraulic power.

Oil right fore and aft the whole ship. Enough to go round the earth!

Very high double bottom--honeycombed.

Coffer dams everywhere stuffed with cork.

This, then, is the Fast Battle Cruiser “Incomparable” of 32 knots speed
and 20-inch guns and no funnels, and phenomenal light draught of water,
because so very long and built so flimsy that she won’t last 10 years,
but that’s long enough for the War!

I have just found copy of a letter I sent Mr. Winston Churchill dated
two months later, when those two very eminent men, having cogitated
over the matter, very kindly informed me that the Visionary was
justified. I omit the details they kindly gave me, as I don’t wish to
deprive them of any trade advantage in the furtherance of their great
commercial intentions with regard to the oil engine, for it is just
now the commercial aspect of the internal combustion engine which
enthrals us. A ship now exists that has a dead weight capacity of 9,500
tons with a speed of eleven knots (which is quite fast enough for all
cargo-carrying purposes) and she burns only a little over ten tons of
oil an hour. Having worked out the matter, I conclude she would save
roughly a thousand pounds in fuel alone over a similar sized steamship
in a voyage of about 3,000 miles (say crossing the Atlantic); and, of
course, as compared with coal, she could carry much additional cargo,
probably about 600 tons more. Then the getting rid of boilers and coal
bunkers gives another immense additional space to the oil engine ship
for cargo, as the oil fuel would be carried in the double-bottom. A
Swiss firm has put on board an ocean-going motor-driven ship a Diesel
engine which develops 2,500 indicated Horse Power in one cylinder, so
that a quadruple-screw motor ship could have 80,000 Horse Power with
sixteen of these cylinders cranked on each shaft. I don’t see why one
shouldn’t have a sextuple-screw motor ship with a hundred thousand
Horse Power. So it is ludicrous to say that the internal combustion
engine is not suited to big ships. For some reason I cannot discover,
“Tramp” owners are hostile to the internal combustion engine. I hope
they will not discover their error too late. I sent two marvellous
pictures of a Motor Battleship to Mr. Winston Churchill on November
17th, 1912, saying to him:--

“These pictures will make your mouth water!”

However, this type of ship is obsolete for war before she has been
begun, as we have got to turn her into a submersible--not that there is
any difficulty in that--it has already been described that in August,
1916, a submersible vessel with a 12-inch gun was proposed and after
extreme hesitation and long delays in construction was built, but she
was completed too late to take part in the war. She might have sunk
a goodly number of the German Fleet at the Battle of Jutland. But our
motto in the war was “Too Late.”[10]

The whole pith and marrow of the Internal Combustion Engine lies in the
science of metallurgy. We are lamentably behind every foreign nation,
without exception, in our application of the Internal Combustion Engine
to commercial purposes, because its reliability depends on Metallurgy,
in which science we are wanting, and we are also wanting in scientific
research on the scale of 12 inches to a foot. We have no scale at all!

_We are going to be left behind!_

The Board of Invention and Research, of which I was President,
after much persistence obtained the loan of a small Laboratory at
South Kensington, greatly aided by Professor Dalby, F.R.S., for
research purposes as regards the Internal Combustion Engine; but its
capabilities were quite inadequate. Then the President of the Council
(Earl Curzon) was to undertake the whole question of Research on a
great and worthy scale, and I got a most kind letter from him. It ended
with the letter!

In this connection I have had wonderful support from Sir Marcus Samuel,
who staked his all on Oil and the Oil Engine. Where should we have
been in this War but for this Prime Mover? I’ve no doubt he is an oil
millionaire now, but that’s not the point. Oil is one of the things
that won us the War. And when he was Lord Mayor of London he was
about the only man who publicly supported me when it was extremely
unfashionable to do so.

       *       *       *       *       *

Oil is the very soul of future Sea Fighting. Hence my interest in it,
and though not intending to work again, yet my consuming passion for
oil and the oil engine made me accept the Chairmanship of a Royal
Commission on Oil and the Oil Engine when Mr. Churchill and Mr. Asquith
found me at Naples in May, 1912.

I have come to the conclusion that about the best thing I ever did
was the following exuberant outburst over Oil and the Oil Engine. I
observe it was printed in November 1912, written “currente calamo,”
and now on reading it over I would not alter a word. I am only aghast
at the astounding stupidity of the British Shipbuilder and the British
Engineer in being behind every country in the development of motor
ships.


OIL AND THE OIL ENGINE (1912).

      I.--With two similar Dreadnoughts oil gives 3 knots more
            speed--that is if ships are designed to burn oil only
            instead of oil and coal--_and speed is everything_.

     II.--The use of oil fuel increases the strength of the British
            Navy 33 per cent., because it can re-fuel at sea off the
            enemy’s Harbours. Coal necessitates about one-third of
            the Fleet being absent re-fuelling at a base (in case
            of war with Germany) some three or four hundred miles
            off!--_i.e._, some six or eight hundred miles unnecessary
            expenditure of fuel and wear and tear of machinery and men.

    III.--Oil for steam-raising reduces the present engine and
            boiler room personnel some 25 per cent., and for Internal
            Combustion Engines would perhaps reduce the personnel over
            60 per cent. This powerfully affects both economy and
            discipline.

     IV.--Oil tankers are in profusion on every sea and as England
            commands the Ocean (_she must command the Ocean to live!!_)
            she has peripatetic re-fuelling stations on every sea and
            every oil tanker’s position known every day to a yard!
            Before very long there will be a million tons of oil on
            the various oceans in hundreds of oil tankers. The bulk of
            these would be at our disposal in time of war. Few or none
            could reach Germany.

      V.--The Internal Combustion Engine with _one_ ton of oil does
            what it takes _four_ tons of coal to do![11] And having
            no funnels or smoke is an _indescribable fighting asset_!
            (Always a chance of smoke in an oil steam-raising vessel
            where of course the funnels which disclose a ship such an
            immense distance off are obligatory. Each enemy’s ship
            spells her name to you by her funnels as they appear on the
            horizon, while you are unseen!)

     VI.--The armament of the Internal Combustion Ship is not hampered
            by funnels, so can give all-round fire, an inestimable
            advantage because the armament can all be placed in the
            central portion of the Hull with all-round fire, and giving
            the ship better seaworthy qualities by not having great
            weights in the extremities, as obligatory where you have
            funnels and boilers.

    VII.--But please imagine the blow to British prestige if a
            German warship with Internal Combustion Propulsion is at
            sea before us and capable of going round the World without
            re-fuelling! What an _Alabama_!!! What an upset to the
            tremblers on the brink who are hesitating to make the
            plunge for Motor Battleships!

          According to a reliable foreign correspondent, the keel of a
            big Oil-Engine Warship for the German Navy is to be laid
            shortly. Krupp has a design for a single cylinder of 4,000
            H.P.! He has had a six-cylinder engine of 2,000 H.P., each
            cylinder successfully running for over a year.

   VIII.--Anyhow, it must be admitted that the burning of oil to
            raise steam is a roundabout way of getting power! The motor
            car and the aeroplane take little drops of oil and explode
            them in cylinders and get all the power required without
            being bothered with furnaces or boilers or steam engines,
            so we say to the marine engineer, “Go and do thou likewise!”

          The sailor’s life on the 70,000 H.P. coal using _Lion_ is
            worse than in any ship in the service owing to the constant
            coalings.

          It’s an economic waste of good material to keep men grilling
            in a baking fire hole at unnecessary labour and use 300 men
            when a dozen or so would suffice!

          Certainly oil at present is not a cheap fuel! but it _is_
            cheap when the advantages are taken into consideration. In
            an Internal Combustion Engine, according to figures given by
            Lord Cowdray, his Mexican oil would work out in England,
            when freights are normal, as equivalent to coal at twelve
            to fifteen shillings a ton!

          Oil does not deteriorate by keeping. Coal does. You can store
            millions of tons of oil without fear of waste or loss of
            power, and England has got to store those millions of tons,
            though this reserve may be gradually built up. The initial
            cost would be substantial but the investment is gilt-edged!
            We must and can face it. _Si vis pacem para bellum!_

          You can re-fuel a ship with oil in minutes as compared with
            hours with coal!

          At any moment during re-fuelling the oil-engine ship can
            fight--the coal-driven ship can’t--she is disorganized--the
            whole crew are black as niggers and worn out with intense
            physical exertion! In the oil-driven ship one man turns a
            tap!

          _It’s criminal folly to allow another pound of coal on board a
            fighting ship!_--or even in a cargo-ship either!--Krupp has
            a design for a cargo-ship with Internal Combustion Engines
            to go 40,000 (forty thousand) miles without re-fuelling!
            It’s vital for the British Fleet and vital for no other
            Fleet, to have the oil engine. That’s the strange thing!
            And if only the Germans knew, they’d shoot their Dr. Diesel
            like a dog!

          Sir Charles Parsons and others prefer small units. It is
            realised in regard to the multiplication of small units (as
            the Lilliputians tied up Gulliver) that though there is
            no important reason why cylinders shall not be multiplied
            on the same shaft yet the space required will be very
            large--the engines thus spreading themselves in the fore
            and aft direction--but here comes in the ingenuity of the
            Naval Constructor and the Marine Engineer in arranging a
            complete fresh adaptation of the hull space and forthwith
            immense fighting advantages will accrue! Far from being
            an insuperable objection it’s a blessing in disguise, for
            with a multiplicity of internal combustion engines there
            undoubtedly follows increased safety from serious or total
            breakdown, provided that suitable means are provided for
            disconnecting any damaged unit and also for preventing in
            case of such failure any damage to the rest of the system.
            The storage of oil fuel lends itself to a remarkable new
            disposition of the whole hull space. Thus a battleship
            could carry some five or six thousand tons of oil in her
            double bottoms--sufficient to go round the earth without
            r-fuelling. The “Non-Pareil” (being the French for the
            “Incomparable”) will carry over 6,000 tons of oil in her
            double bottoms, with an extra double bottom below those
            carrying the oil. This is equal to 24,000 tons of coal!

          This new arrangement of the hull space permits some dozen
            motor boats being carried in a central armoured pit (where
            the funnels used to be). These 60-feet motor boats would
            carry 21-inch Torpedoes and have a speed of 40 knots.
            Imagine these hornets being let loose in a sea fight! The
            21-inch Torpedo which they carry goes 5 miles! And the
            silhouette of an Internal Combustion Battleship is over 30
            per cent. less than any living or projected Battleship in
            the target offered to the enemy’s fire.

      IX.--Finally:

                      _To be first in the race is everything!_

          Just consider our immense gains in having been first with the
            water-tube boiler! First with the turbine! First with the
            13½-inch gun! Just take this last as an illustration! We
            shall have 16 ships armed with the 13½-inch gun before the
            Germans have a single ship with anything bigger than the
            12-inch, and the 13½-inch is as superior to the 12-inch as
            the 12-inch is to a peashooter.

          And yet we hesitate to plunge with a Motor Battleship! Why
            boggle at this plunge when we have plunged before, every
            time with success?

          People say Internal Combustion Propulsion in a hundred
            thousand horse-power _Dreadnought_ is similarly impossible!
            “Wait and see!”--The “Non-Pareil” is coming along!

          The rapid development of the oil engine is best illustrated
            by the fact that a highly influential and rich German
            syndicate have arranged for six passenger steamers for the
            Atlantic and Pacific Trade, of 22 knots speed and 36,000
            H.P. with nine of Krupp’s cylinders of 4,000 H.P. each on
            three shafts.[12]

          There need be no fear of an oil famine because of the immense
            sure oil areas recently brought to notice in Canada,
            Persia, Mesopotamia and elsewhere. The British oil area in
            Trinidad alone will be able to more than supply all the
            requirements of the British Navy. Assuming the present coal
            requirements of the Navy at 1½ million tons annually, then
            less than half a million tons of oil would suffice when
            the whole British Navy is oil engined, and, as recently
            remarked by the greatest oil magnate, this amount would be
            a bagatelle compared with the total output of oil, which he
            expects before many years to reach an output of a hundred
            million tons a year in consequence of the great demand for
            developing its output and the discovery of new oil areas
            and the working of shale deposits.

We turned coal-burning Battleships that were building in November,
1914, into oilers, with great increase of efficiency and speed.

       *       *       *       *       *

I have chanced upon a Memorandum on “Oil and its Fighting Attributes,”
which I drew up on March 3rd, 1913, for the First Lord of the
Admiralty. It shows what a Great Personality can effect. I was told by
an enemy of Mr. Deterding (of whom I am speaking) that when he came
in as Manager of the Great Shell Oil Combine, the Concern could have
been bought for £40,000. When I wrote my Memorandum, it was valued by
a hostile Oil Magnate (who told me this himself) at forty millions
sterling. Whether it is Oil, or Peace, or War, it’s the Man, and not
the System that Wins. And Mr. Deterding is the man who shifted the
centre of gravity of oil (together with an immense assemblage of clerks
and chemists and all the paraphernalia of a huge financial web) from
abroad to this country.

    “The ideal accumulator which everybody has been after for
    the last 50 years, is oil. There will never be found another
    accumulator or source of power of such small volume as oil.

    “Just fancy! Get a gallon of oil and a man can go to Brighton
    and back again, carrying the weight of his bicycle and himself
    by means of it....

    “It’s a shame that anybody is allowed to put oil under a
    boiler--for this reason, that when oil is used in an oil engine
    it realises about five times greater effect....

    “The moment the price of oil is £5 a ton it will not be used
    anywhere under a boiler for steam raising, and the whole
    world’s supply will be available for the Navy and the Diesel
    Engine....

    “I am going to raise every penny I can get and build storage,
    and even when I have built five million tons of storage I
    am still going on building it and filling it, even if it is
    only for the pleasure of looking at it. It is always so much
    condensed labour stored for the future....

    “Oil fuel when stored, does not deteriorate as coal does.
    The stocks would therefore constitute a national asset, the
    intrinsic value of which would not diminish.”... (Mr. Deterding
    before the Royal Commission on Oil and Oil Engines.)

My Memorandum was as follows:--

    Mr. Deterding in his evidence before the Royal Commission,
    confesses that he possesses in Roumania, in Russia, in
    California, in the Dutch Indies, in Trinidad, and shortly in
    Mexico, the controlling interest in oil. The Anglo-Persian
    Company also say he is getting Mesopotamia and squeezing
    Persia which are practically untouched areas of immense size
    reeking with oil. Without doubt Mr. Deterding is Napoleonic in
    his audacity and Cromwellian in his thoroughness. Sir Thomas
    Browning in his evidence says that the Royal Dutch-Shell
    Combination is more powerful and aggressive than ever was the
    great Standard Oil Trust of America.

    Let us therefore listen with deep attention to the words of a
    man who has the sole executive control of the most powerful
    organisation on earth for the production of a source of power
    which almost doubles the power of our Navy whilst our potential
    enemies remain normal in the strength of their fleets. _What
    does he advise?_

    He says: “Oil is the most extraordinary article in the
    commercial world and the only thing that hampers its sale is
    its production. There is no other article in the world where
    you can get the consumption as long as you make the production.
    In the case of oil make the production first as the consumption
    will come. There is no need to look after the consumption, and
    as a seller you need not make forward contracts as the oil
    sells itself.” Only what you want is an enormously long purse
    to be able to snap your fingers at everybody and if people
    do not want to buy it to-day to be able to say to them: “All
    right; I will spend a million sterling in making reservoirs
    and then in the future you will have to pay so much more.”
    “The great point for the Navy is to get oil from someone who
    can draw supplies from many spots, because no one spot can be
    absolutely relied on.” There is not anybody who can be certain
    of his supply; oil fields in my own experience which at the
    time yielded 18,000 barrels a day within five days went down to
    3,000 barrels without the slightest warning.

_The British Empire “has the long purse”; build reservoirs and store
oil. Keep on building reservoirs and buy oil at favourable rates when
they offer._


                                                  _November 21st, 1917._

The report below of the Secretary of the United States Navy is
interesting. I have just been looking up the record in 1886, when
high officials said I was an “Oil Maniac.” I was at that time at
the Admiralty as Director of Naval Ordnance, and was sent from that
appointment to be Admiral Superintendent of Portsmouth Dockyard,
prior to being appointed Controller of the Navy, where I remained six
years. At Portsmouth Dockyard, while I was Admiral Superintendent,
we paved the way for rapid shipbuilding in the completion of the
Battleship “Royal Sovereign” in two years. Afterwards, with the same
superintendence but additional vigour, we completed the “Dreadnought”
in one year and one day ready for Battle!


OIL BURNING BATTLESHIPS.

                                                             WASHINGTON.

Mr. Daniels, Secretary of the Navy, issues a report urging that
Congress should authorise the construction of three Battleships, one
Battle Cruiser, and nine Fleet Submarines. He favours oil-burning
units, and says that the splendid work which has been accomplished by
these vessels would not have been done by coal-burning ships. _The use
of any other power but oil is not now in sight._




CHAPTER XIII

THE BIG GUN


Perhaps the most convincing speech I ever read was made impromptu by
Admiral Sir Reginald Bacon at a meeting of the Institution of Naval
Architects on March 12th, 1913.

First of all Admiral Bacon disposed of the fallacy brought forward by
one of the speakers, as to which is more effective in disabling the
enemy, to destroy the structure of the ship or destroy the guns--the
fact being that both are bound up together--if you utterly destroy the
hull of the ship you thereby practically destroy the gun-fire. (This
is one of those things so obvious that one greatly wonders how these
clever experts lose themselves.)

Then Admiral Bacon in a most lovely parable disposed of the “Bow and
Arrow Party,” who want a lot of small guns instead of, as in the
Dreadnought, but one type of gun and that the heaviest gun that can be
made. This is Admiral Bacon:--

    “I should like to draw your attention to some advice that was
    given many years ago by an old Post Captain to a Midshipman.
    He said, ‘Boy, if ever you are dining and after dinner, over
    the wine, some subject like politics is discussed when men’s
    passions are aroused, if a man throws a glass of wine in your
    face, do not throw a glass of wine in his: _Throw the decanter
    stopper!_’ And that is what we advocates of the Heavy Gun as
    mounted in the Dreadnought propose to do--not to slop the
    six-inch shot over the shirt-front of a battleship, but to go
    for her with the heaviest guns we can get; and the heavier
    the explosive charge you can get in your shell and the bigger
    explosion you can wreak on the structure near the turrets and
    the conning tower and over the armoured deck the more likely
    you are to disable that ship. We object most strongly to the
    fire of the big guns being interfered with by the use of
    smaller guns at the same time with all the smoke and mess that
    are engendered by them. The attention of the Observing Officers
    is distracted; their sight is to a great extent obliterated,
    and even the theoretical result of the small guns is not worth
    the candle.... The ordinary six-inch gun in a battleship is,
    as regards torpedo-boat attack, of just as much use as a stick
    is to an old gentleman who is being snow-balled: it keeps his
    enemy at a respectful distance but still within the vulnerable
    range of the torpedo. In these days the locomotive torpedo
    can be fired at ranges at which it is absolutely impossible
    even to hope or think of hitting the Destroyer which fires
    the torpedoes at you. You may try to do it, but it is quite
    useless. Very well, then; the six-inch gun does keep the
    Destroyer at a longer range than would be the case if the
    six-inch gun were not there, that’s all.... Then the problem
    of speed has been touched upon. I quite see from one point of
    view that to lose two guns for an extra five-knot speed seems
    a great loss; but there is one question which I should like
    to ask, and that is whether you would send out to sea a whole
    fleet, the whole strength of the nation, with no single ship of
    sufficient superior speed to pick up a particular ship of the
    enemy? That is the point to rivet your attention upon. We must
    always in our Navy have ships of greatly superior speed to any
    one particular ship in the enemy’s fleet, otherwise over the
    face of the sea you will have ships of the enemy roaming about
    that we cannot overhaul and that nothing can touch.”

The above words were spoken by Admiral Bacon two and three-quarter
years before Admiral von Spee and his fast Squadron were caught up
and destroyed by the British fast Battle Cruisers, “Invincible” and
“Inflexible.” Admiral Bacon was a prophet! In other words, Admiral
Bacon had Common Sense, and saw the Obvious.

It’s difficult for a shore-going person to realise things obvious to
the sailor. For instance: in the case of a Big Gun, if twice two is
four, then twice four isn’t eight, it’s sixteen, and twice eight isn’t
sixteen, it’s sixty-four; that is to say, the bursting effect of a
shell varies with the square. So the bigger the calibre of the gun the
more immense is the desolating effect of the shell, and, incidentally,
the longer the range at which you hit the enemy.

The projectile of the 20-inch gun that was ready to be made for H.M.S.
“Incomparable” weighed _over two tons_, and the gun itself weighed 200
_tons_. Such a projectile, associated with a Howitzer, may effect vast
changes in both Sea and Land War, because of the awful and immense
craters such shell explosions would effect.

To illustrate the frightful devastating effect of such huge shell I
will tell a story that I heard from a great friend of mine, a Japanese
Admiral. He was a Lieutenant at the time of the Chino-Japanese War.
The Chinese vessels mounted very heavy guns. One of their shells burst
on the side of the Japanese ship in which my friend was. The Captain
sent him down off the bridge to see what had happened, as the ship
tottered under the effect of this shell. When he got down on the gun
deck, he saw, as it were, the whole side of the ship open to the sea,
and not a vestige of any of the crew could he see. They had all been
blown to pieces. The only thing he rescued was the uniform cap of his
friend, the Lieutenant who was in charge of that division of guns,
blown up overhead between the beams. The huge rope mantlets that acted
as splinter nettings hung between the guns had utterly disappeared and
were resolved into tooth powder! (so he described it).

I digress here with an anecdote that comes to my mind and which greatly
impressed me with the extraordinary humility of the Japanese mind. I
had remonstrated with my Japanese friend as to Admiral Togo not having
been suitably rewarded for his wonderful victory over the Russian
Admiral Rozhdestvensky. He replied: “Sir, Admiral Togo has received
the Second Class of the Order of the Golden Kite!” We should have made
him a Duke straight off! Togo was made a Count afterwards, but not all
at once--for fear, I suppose, of giving him a swelled head. He was a
great man, Togo; he was extremely diffident about accepting the English
Order of Merit, and even then he wore the Order the wrong way out, so
that the inscription “For Merit” should not be seen. The Mikado asked
him, after the great battle, to bring to him the bravest man in the
Fleet; the Mikado expecting to see a Japanese of some sort. I am told
that Admiral Togo brought Admiral Pakenham, who was alongside him
during the action. I quite believe it; but I have always been too shy
to ask my friend if it was true. All I know is that I never read better
Despatches anywhere than those of Admiral Pakenham.

[Illustration:

  _Reproduced by courtesy of_ “_The Graphic_”

LORD FISHER’S PROPOSED SHIP, H.M.S. “INCOMPARABLE,” SHOWN ALONGSIDE
H.M.S. “DREADNOUGHT.”]

Somewhat is said in my “Memories” of the unmistakable astoundingness
of huge bursting charges in the shell of big guns. (I should be sorry
to limit the effects to even Geometrical Progression!) I don’t think
Science has as yet more than mathematically investigated the amazing
quality of Detonation. Here is a picture (see opposite p. 176) of only
eighteen inch gun shells, such as the Battle Cruiser “Furious” was
designed and built to fire. Her guns with their enormous shells were
built to make it impossible for the Germans to prevent the Russian
Millions from landing on the Pomeranian Coast! In this connection I
append a rough sketch by Oscar Parkes of a twenty-inch gun ship (see
opposite). The sketch will offend the critical eye of my very talented
friend, Sir Eustace Tennyson d’Eyncourt, but it’s good enough for
shoregoing people to give them the idea of what, but for the prodigious
development of Air-craft, would have been as great a New Departure as
was the “Dreadnought.” The shells of the “Incomparable” fired from her
twenty-inch guns would each have weighed over two tons! Imagine two
tons being hurled by each of these guns to a height above the summit
of the Matterhorn, or any other mountain you like to take, and bursting
on its reaching the ground far out of human sight, but yet with exact
accuracy as to where it should fall, causing in its explosion a crater
somewhat like that of Vesuvius or Mount Etna, and consequently you can
then easily imagine the German Army fleeing for its life from Pomerania
to Berlin. The “Furious” (and all her breed) was not built for Salvoes!
They were built for Berlin, and that’s why they drew so little water
and were built so fragile, so as to weigh as little as possible, and so
go faster.

It is very silly indeed to build vessels of War so strong as to
last a hundred years. They are obsolete in less than ten years. But
the Navy is just one mass of Tories! In the old days a Sailing Line
of Battleship never became obsolete; the winds of Heaven remained
as in the days of Noah. I staggered one Old Admiral by telling him
that it blew twice as hard now as when he was at sea; he couldn’t go
head-to-wind in his day with sails only, now with the wind forty miles
against you you can go forty miles dead against it, and therefore the
wind is equal to eighty miles an hour. He didn’t quite take it in. I
heard one First Sea Lord say to the Second Sea Lord, when scandalised
at seeing in a new ship a bathroom for the midshipmen, that he never
washed when he went to sea and he didn’t see why the midshipmen should
now! But what most upset him was that the seat of the water-closet was
mahogany French-polished, instead of good old oak holystoned every
morning and so always nice and damp to sit on. (Another improvement is
unmentionable!)

I must not leave this chapter without expressing my unbounded delight
in having to do business with so splendid a man as Major A. G. Hadcock,
the Head of the Ordnance Department at the Elswick Works, who fought
out single-handed all the difficulties connected with the inception
of the eighteen-inch and the twenty-inch guns of the “Furious” and
“Incomparable.” I have another friend of the same calibre, who has
consistently been in the forefront of the Battle for the adoption of
the biggest possible gun that could be constructed--Admiral Sir Sydney
Eardley-Wilmot; he was also the most efficient Chief of the Munitions
Department of the Admiralty. When I was gasping with Hadcock over a
20-inch gun, Wilmot had a 22-inch gun! I really felt small (quite
unusual with me!). Now I hope no one is going to quote this line when
they review this book:--“Some men grow great, others only swell.”




CHAPTER XIV

SOME PREDICTIONS


When I was “sore let and hindered” in the days of my youth as a young
Lieutenant, a cordial hand was always held out to me by Commodore
Goodenough. He was killed by the South Sea Islanders with a poisoned
arrow. Being on intimate terms with him, I sent him, in 1868, a
reasoned statement proving conclusively that masts and sails were
damned as the motive power of warships.

(As a parenthesis I here insert the fact that so late as 1896 a
distinguished Admiral, on full pay and in active employment, put
forward a solemn declaration that unless sixteen sailing vessels were
built for the instruction of the Officers and men of the Navy the
fighting efficiency of the Fleet would go to the devil.)

Commodore Goodenough was so impressed by my memorandum that he had
a multitude of copies printed and circulated, with the result that
they were all burnt and I was damned, and I got a very good talking
to by the First Sea Lord. I hadn’t the courage of those fine old
boys--Bishops Latimer and Ridley--and ran away from the stake. Besides,
I wanted to get on. I felt my day had not yet come. Years after, I
commanded the “Inflexible,” still with masts and sails. She had every
sort of wonderful contrivance in engines, electricity, etc.; but
however well we did with them we were accorded no credit. The sails
had as much effect upon her in a gale of wind as a fly would have on a
hippopotamus in producing any movement. However, we shifted topsails
in three minutes and a half and the Admiral wrote home to say the
“Inflexible” was the best ship in the Fleet. Ultimately the masts and
sails were taken out of her.

It was not till I was Director of Naval Ordnance that wooden boarding
pikes were done away with. I had a good look round, at the time, to see
if there were any bows and arrows left.

What my retrograde enemies perfectly detested was being called “the
bow and arrow party.” When later they fought against me about speed
being the first desideratum, the only way I bowled them over was by
designating them as “the Snail and Tortoise party.” It was always the
same lot. They wanted to put on so much armour to make themselves safe
in battle that their ideal became like one of the Spithead Forts--it
could hardly move, it had so much armour on. The great principle of
fighting is simplicity, but the way a ship used to be built was that
you put into her everybody’s fad and everybody’s gun, and she sank in
the water so much through the weight of all these different fads that
she became a tortoise! The greatest possible speed with the biggest
practicable gun was, up to the time of aircraft, the acme of sea
fighting. Now, there is only one word--“Submersible.”

But to proceed with another Prediction:

The second prediction followed naturally from the first. With machinery
being dictated to us as the motive power instead of sails, officers and
men would have to become Engineers, and discipline would be better, and
so you would not require to have Marines to shoot the sailors in case
of mutiny. Now this does sound curious, but again it is so obvious.
When the sails were the motive power, the best Petty Officers--that
is to say, the smartest of the seamen--got their positions, not by
good conduct, but by their temerity aloft, and the man who hauled
out the weather-earing in reefing topsails in a gale of wind and
balanced himself on his stomach on a topsail yard, with the ship in
a mountainous sea, was a man you had to have in a leading position,
whatever his conduct was. But once the sails were done away with and
there was no going aloft, then the whole ship’s company became what may
be called “good conduct” men, and could be Marines, or, if you liked to
call them so, Sailors. One plan I had was to do away with the sailors;
and another plan I had was to do away with Marines. I plumped for the
sailors, though I loved the Marines.

In December, 1868, I predicted and patented a sympathetic exploder for
submarine mines. In the last year of the war this very invention proved
to be the most deadly of all species of submarine mines.

Quite a different sort of prediction occurs in a letter I wrote to Sir
Maurice Hankey in 1910, and of which he reminded me in the following
letter:


LETTER FROM SIR M. HANKEY, K.C.B. (SECRETARY TO THE WAR CABINET).

                                     OFFICES OF THE WAR CABINET,
                                         2, WHITEHALL GARDENS, S.W.
                                                   _May 28th, 1917._

    MY DEAR LORD FISHER,

    I am sending your letter along to my wife and asking her to
    write to you and send both a copy of your letter to me in 1910
    about Mr. Asquith’s leaving office in November, 1916,[13] and
    also to write to you about your prophecy of war with Germany
    beginning in 1914, and Sir John Jellicoe being in command of
    the Grand Fleet when war broke out.

    I have the clearest recollection of the incident. My wife and
    I had been down to you for a week-end to Kilverstone. You had
    persuaded us not to go up by the early train on the Monday,
    and you took us to the rose-garden, where there was a sundial
    with a charming and interesting inscription. You linked one
    arm through my wife’s and the other through mine, and walked
    us round and round the paths, and it was walking thus that you
    made the extraordinary prophecy--

    “_The War will come in 1914, and Jellicoe will command the
    Grand Fleet._”

I remember that my practical mind revolted against the prophecy, and
I pressed you for reasons. You then told us that the Kiel Canal,
according to experts whom you had assembled five or six years before
to examine this question, could not be enlarged for the passage of
the new German Dreadnoughts before 1914, and that Germany, though bent
on war, would not risk it until this date. As regards Jellicoe, you
explained how you yourself had so cast his professional career in such
directions as to train him for the post, and, after a brief horoscope
of his normal prospects of promotion, you indicated your intention of
watching over his career--as you actually did.

All this remains vividly in my mind, and I believe in that of my wife,
but, as I am not going home for a few days, she shall give you her
unbiassed account.

The calculation itself was an interesting one, but what strikes me
now as more remarkable is the “flair” with which you forecasted with
certainty the state of mind of the German Emperor and his advisers, and
their intention to go to war the first moment they dared....

No more now.

                                               In haste,
                                                       Yours ever,
                                               (Signed) M. P. A. HANKEY.

The grounds for my prophecies are stated elsewhere. I won’t repeat them
here. They really weren’t predictions; they were certainties.

I remark in passing that what the sundial said was:--

                           “Forsitan Ultima.”

By the way, I was called a sundial once by a vituperative woman whom
I didn’t know; she wrote a letter abusing me as an optimist, and sent
these lines:--

    “There he stands amidst the flowers,
    Counting only sunny hours,
    Heeding neither rain nor mist,
    That brazen-faced old optimist.”

Another woman (but I knew her) in sending me some lovely roses to
crown the event of a then recent success, sent also some beautiful
lines likewise of her own making. She regretted that I preferred a
crown of thorns to a crown of the thornless roses she sent me. The
rose she alluded to is called “Zephyrine Drouhin,” and, to me, it is
astounding that it is so unknown. It is absolutely the only absolute
thornless rose; it has absolutely the sweetest scent of any rose; it
is absolutely the most glorious coloured of all roses; it blooms more
than any rose; it requires no pruning, and costs less than any rose. I
planted these roses when I left the Admiralty in 1910. Somebody told
the Naval Attaché at Rome, not knowing that he knew me, that I had
taken to planting roses, and his remark was: “They’ll d--d well have to
grow!” He had served many years with me.




CHAPTER XV

THE BALTIC PROJECT

    _Note._--This paper was submitted for my consideration by Sir
    Julian Corbett, in the early autumn of 1914.


From the shape the war has now taken, it is to be assumed that Germany
is trusting for success to a repetition of the methods of Frederick
the Great in the Seven Years’ War. Not only are the conditions of the
present war closely analogous--the main difference being that Great
Britain and Austria have changed places--but during the last 15 years
the German Great General Staff have been producing an elaborate study
of these campaigns.

Broadly stated, Frederick’s original plan in that war was to meet the
hostile coalition with a sudden offensive against Saxony, precisely as
the Germans began with France. When that offensive failed, Frederick
fell back on a defensive plan under which he used his interior position
to deliver violent attacks beyond each of his frontiers successively.
By this means he was able for seven years to hold his own against odds
practically identical with those which now confront Germany; and in the
end, though he made none of the conquests he expected, he was able to
secure peace on the basis of the _status quo ante_ and materially to
enhance his position in Europe.

In the present war, so far as it has gone, the same methods promise the
same result. Owing to her excellent communications, Germany has been
able to employ Frederick’s methods with even greater success than he
did; and at present there seems no certain prospect of the Allies being
able to overcome them soon enough to ensure that exhaustion will not
sap the vigour and cohesion of the coalition.

The only new condition in favour of the Allies is that the Command
of the Sea is now against Germany, and it is possible that its mere
passive pressure may avail to bring her to a state of hopeless
exhaustion from which we were able to save Frederick in the earlier
war. If it is believed that this passive pressure can achieve the
desired result within a reasonable time, then there is no reason for
changing our present scheme of naval operations. If, on the other hand,
we have no sufficient promise of our passive attitude effecting what
is required to turn the scale, then it may be well to consider the
possibility of bringing our Command of the Sea to bear more actively.

We have only to go back again to the Seven Years’ War to find a means
of doing this, which, _if feasible under modern conditions_, would
promise success as surely as it did in the eighteenth century.

Though Frederick’s method succeeded, it was once brought within an ace
of failure. From the first he knew that the weak point of his system
was his northern frontier.

_He knew that a blow in force from the Baltic could at any time
paralyse his power of striking right and left, and it was in dread of
this from Russia that he began by pressing us so hard to provide him
with a covering fleet in that sea._

Owing to our world-wide preoccupations we were never able to provide
such a fleet, and the result was that at the end of 1761 the Russians
were able to seize the port of Colberg, occupy the greater part of
Pomerania, and winter there in preparation for the decisive campaign
in the following spring. Frederick’s view of his danger is typified in
the story that he now took to carrying a phial of poison in his pocket.
Owing, however, to the sudden death of the Czarina in the winter the
fatal campaign was never fought. Russia made peace and Prussia was
saved.

So critical an episode in the early history of Prussia cannot be
without an abiding influence in Berlin. Indeed, it is not too much to
say that in a country where military thought tends to dominate naval
plans, _the main value of the German Fleet must be its ability to keep
the command of the Baltic so far in dispute that hostile invasion
across it is impossible_.

_If then it is considered necessary to adopt a more drastic war plan
than that we are now pursuing, and to seek to revive the fatal stroke
of 1761, it is for consideration whether we are able to break down
the situation which the German fleet has set up. Are we, in short,
in a position to occupy the Baltic in such strength as to enable an
adequate Russian army to land in the spring on the coast of Pomerania
within striking distance of Berlin or so as to threaten the German
communications eastward?_

The first and most obvious difficulty attending such an operation is
that it would require the whole of our battle force, and we could
not at the same time occupy the North Sea effectively. We should,
therefore, lie open to the menace of a counterstroke which might at
any time force us to withdraw from the Baltic; and the only means of
preventing this--since the western exit of the Kiel Canal cannot be
blocked--

    _would be to sow the North Sea with mines on such a scale that
    naval operations in it would become impossible_.

The objections to such an expedient, both moral and practical, are, of
course, very great. The chief moral objection is offence to neutrals.
But it is to be observed that they are already suffering severely from
the open-sea mining which the Germans inaugurated, and it is possible
that, could they be persuaded that carrying the system of open-sea
mining to its logical conclusion would expedite the end of the present
intolerable conditions, they might be induced to adopt an attitude of
acquiescence. The actual attitude of the northern neutral Powers looks
at any rate as if they would be glad to acquiesce in any measure which
promised them freedom from their increasing apprehension of Germany’s
intentions. Sweden, at any rate, who would, after Holland, be the
greatest sufferer, has recently been ominously reminded of the days
when Napoleon forced her into war with us against her will.

In this connection it may also be observed that where one belligerent
departs from the rules of civilised warfare, it is open to the other to
take one of two courses. He may secure a moral advantage by refusing to
follow a bad lead, or he may seek a physical advantage by forcing the
enemy’s crime to its utmost consequences. _By the half measures we have
adopted hitherto in regard to open-sea mines, we are enjoying neither
the one advantage nor the other._

On the general idea of breaking up the German war plan by operations
in the Baltic, it may be recalled that it is not new to us. It was
attempted--but a little too late--during Napoleon’s Friedland-Eylau
campaign. It was again projected in 1854, when our operations in
the Great War after Trafalgar, and particularly in the Peninsula,
were still living memories. In that year we sent a Fleet into the
Baltic with the idea of covering the landing of a French force within
striking distance of Petrograd, which was to act in combination with
the Prussian army; but as Prussia held back, the idea was never
carried out. Still, the mere presence of our Fleet--giving colour
to the menace--did avail to keep a very large proportion of the
Russian strength away from the Crimea, and so materially hastened the
successful conclusion of the war.

On this analogy, it is for consideration whether, even if the suggested
operation is not feasible, a menace of carrying it out--concerted with
Russia--might not avail seriously to disturb German equilibrium and
force her to desperate expedients, even to hazarding a Fleet action or
to alienating entirely the Scandinavian Powers by drastic measures of
precaution.

The risks, of course, must be serious; but unless we are fairly sure
that the passive pressure of our Fleet is really bringing Germany to
a state of exhaustion, _risks must be taken to use our command of the
Sea with greater energy_; or, so far as the actual situation promises,
we can expect no better issue for the present war than that which the
continental coalition was forced to accept in the Seven Years’ War.


_Lord Fisher to Mr. Lloyd George._

                                         36, BERKELEY SQUARE,
                                               LONDON,
                                                 _March 28th, 1917_.

    DEAR PRIME MINISTER,

    I hardly liked to go further with my remarks this morning,
    recognising how very valuable your time is, but I would have
    liked to have added how appalling it is that the Germans may
    now be about to deal a deadly blow to Russia by sending a large
    German Force by sea from Kiel to take St. Petersburg (which, as
    the Russian Prime Minister, Stolypin, told me, is the Key of
    Russia! All is concentrated there!). And here we are with our
    Fleet passive and unable to frustrate this German Sea attack
    on Russia. All this due to the grievous faulty Naval strategy
    of not adopting the Baltic Project put before Mr. Asquith in
    association with the scheme for the British Army advancing
    along the Belgian Coast, by which we should have re-captured
    Antwerp, and there would have been no German submarine menace
    such as now is. An Armada of 612 vessels was constructed to
    carry out this policy, thanks to your splendid approval of the
    cost when you were Chancellor of the Exchequer.

    I. Our Naval Strategy has been unimaginative.

    II. Our shipbuilding Policy has been futile, inasmuch as it has
    not coped with the German Submarine Menace.

    III. Our Naval Intelligence of the enemy’s doings is good for
    nothing. For it is impossible to conceive there would have
    been apathy at the Admiralty had it been known how the Germans
    were building submarines in such numbers--3 a week, Sir John
    Jellicoe told us at the War Cabinet. I say 5 a week.

                                                Yours, etc.,
                                                    (Signed) FISHER.
                                                        28/3/17.

I append a couple of extracts from Memoranda made by me in 1902, when I
was Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet.

    “Here we see 5,000 of these offensive floating mines laid
    down off Port Arthur, covering a wider space than the English
    Channel, and we, so far, have none, nor any vessel yet fitted!
    What a scandal! For a purpose unnecessary to be detailed
    here, it is absolutely obligatory for us to have these mines
    instantly for war against Germany. They are an imperative
    strategic necessity, and must be got at once.”


AUTOMATIC DROPPING MINES FOR OCEAN USE.

    “The question of the use of these mines as an adjunct to a
    Battle Fleet in a Fleet action has not been put forward so
    strongly as desirable as compared with their use for preventing
    ingress or egress to a port. They can be used with facility in
    the open sea in depths up to 150 fathoms. There is no question
    that they could be employed with immense effect to protect
    the rear of a retreating Fleet. This type of mine is quite
    different to the blockade mine. They are offensive mines. Is
    it wise, indeed is it prudent not to acquaint ourselves, by
    exhaustive trials, what the possibility of such a weapon may
    be, and how it may be counteracted?”




CHAPTER XVI

THE NAVY IN THE WAR


SCAPA FLOW.

Ages before the War, but after I became First Sea Lord on Trafalgar
Day, 1904, I was sitting locked up in a secluded room that I had
mis-appropriated at the Admiralty, looking at a chart of the North Sea,
and playing with a pair of compasses, when these thoughts came into
my mind! “Those d--d Germans, if dear old Tirpitz is only far-seeing
enough, will multiply means of ‘dishing’ a blockade by making the life
of surface ships near the coast line a burden to them by submarines and
destroyers. (At this time the Germans had only one submarine, and she a
failure!) Also, as their radius of action grows through the marvellous
oil engine, and ‘internal combustion’ changes the face of sea war, we
must have our British Fleet so placed at such a distance from hostile
attack that our Force off the Enemy’s Coast will cut off his marauders
at daylight in the morning on their marauding return.” I put that safe
distance for the British Fleet on my compasses and swept a circle,
and behold it came to a large inland land-locked sheet of water, but
there was no name to it on the chart and no soundings in it put on the
chart. I sent for the Hydrographer, and pointing to the spot, I said:
“Bring me the large scale chart. What’s its name?” He didn’t know. He
would find out.

He was a d--d long time away, and I rang the bell twice and sent him
word each time that I was getting angry!

When he turned up, he said it hadn’t been properly surveyed, and he
believed it was called Scapa Flow! So up went a surveying ship about
an hour afterwards, and discovered, though the current raged through
the Pentland Firth at sometimes 14 knots, yet inside this huge secluded
basin it was comparatively a stagnant pool! Wasn’t that another proof
that we are the ten lost tribes of Israel? And the Fleet went there
forty-eight hours before the War, and a German in the German Fleet
wrote to his father to say how it had been intended to torpedo the
British Fleet, but it had left unexpectedly sooner for this Northern
“Unknown!” Also, he said in his letter that Jellicoe’s appointment as
Admiralissimo was very painful to them as they knew of his extreme
skill in the British Naval Manœuvres of 1913. Also, thirdly, he added
to his Papa that it was a d--d nuisance we had bagged the two Turkish
Dreadnoughts in the Tyne the very day they were ready to start, as they
belonged to Germany!

The mention of Jellicoe reminds me of Yamamoto saying to me that, just
before their War with Russia, he had superseded a splendid Admiral
loved by his Fleet, because Togo was “just a little better!!!”

The superseded man was his own _protégé_, and Togo wasn’t. No wonder
these Japanese fight!

Prince Fushishima, the Mikado’s brother, told me of 4,000 of a special
company of the bluest blood in Japan, of whom all except four were
killed in action or died of wounds--only nine were invalided for
sickness. However, I remarked to him we were braver than those 4,000
Japanese, because their religion is they go to Heaven if they die for
their country, and we are not so sure! He agreed with me, and gave me a
lovely present.


A PRE-WAR PROPHECY.

On December the 3rd, 1908, when I was First Sea Lord of the Admiralty,
I hazarded a prophecy (but, of course, I was only doing the obvious!)
that should we be led by our anti-Democratic tendencies in High
Places, and by Secret Treaties and by Compromising Attendances of
Great Military Officers at the French Manœuvres at Nancy, into a sort
of tacit pledge to France to land a British Army in France in a war
against Germany, then would come the biggest blow to England she would
ever have experienced--not a defeat, _because we never succumb_--but
a deadly blow to our economic resources and by the relegation of the
British Navy into a “Subsidiary Service.” I said in 1908 (and told
King Edward so) that the German Emperor would, in such a case, order
his generals “to fight neither with small nor great,” but only with
the English and wipe them out! So has it come to pass, as regards the
Emperor giving these orders and his having this desire!

The original English Expeditionary Force was but a drop in the Ocean
as compared with the German and French millions of soldiers, and the
value, _though not the gallantry_ of its exploits, has been greatly
over-rated. It was a very long time indeed before the British Army held
any considerable portion of the fighting line in France, and instead
of being on the seashore, in touch with the British Fleet and with
easy access to England, the British Expeditionary Force was by French
directions and because of French susceptibilities, stationed far away
from the sea, and sandwiched between French troops. We have always been
giving in to the susceptibilities of others and having none of our own!
The whole war illustrates this statement. The Naval situation in the
Mediterranean perhaps exemplifies this more than any other instance!

Had the French maintained the defensive in 1915, it is unquestionable
that it would have been the Germans and not the French who would have
suffered the bloody losses in the regions of Artois and the Champagne.

_We built up a great Army, but we wrecked our shipbuilding._ We ought
to have equipped Russia before we equipped our own Armies, for, had we
done so, the Russians would never have sustained the appalling losses
they did in pitting pikes against rifles and machine-guns. This was the
real reason of the Russian Catastrophe--the appalling casualties and
the inability of the old _régime_ to supply armaments on the modern
scale. Had another policy been pursued and the British Fleet, with its
enormous supremacy, cleared the Baltic of the German Navy and landed a
Russian Army on the Pomeranian Coast, then the War would have been won
in 1915! Also, as I pointed out in November, 1914, to Lord Kitchener,
we ought to have given Bulgaria all she asked of us. When later we
offered her these same terms she refused us with derisive laughter!

There was no difficulty in all this, but we were pusillanimous and we
procrastinated.

_We did not equip Russia!_ WE DID NOT SOW THE NORTH SEA WITH THOUSANDS
UPON THOUSANDS OF MINES, as I advocated in the Autumn of 1914,
and I bought eight of the fastest ships in the world to lay them
down! This sowing of the North Sea with a multitude of mines would
automatically have established a Complete Blockade! Again, we did not
foster Agriculture, and we almost ceased building Merchant Ships,
and robbed our building yards and machine shops of the most skilled
artisans and mechanics in the world to become “cannon fodder”! But a
wave of unthinking Militarism swept over the country and submerged
the Government, and we were in May, 1918, hard put to it to bring the
American Army across the Atlantic as we were so short of shipping.

It needs not a Soldier to realise that had the British Expeditionary
Force of 160,000 men been landed at Antwerp by the British Fleet in
August, 1914 (instead of its occupying a small sector in the midst of
the French Army in France), that the War would certainly have ended
in 1915. This, in conjunction with the seizure of the Baltic by the
British Fleet and the landing of a Russian Army on the Pomeranian Coast
would have smashed the Germans. All this was foreshadowed in 1908, and
the German Emperor kindly gave me the credit as the Instigator of the
Idea so deadly to Germany.


THE “MONSTROUS” CRUISERS SO DERIDED IN PARLIAMENT

    _Note._--When I came to the Admiralty as First Sea Lord in
    October, 1914--three months after the War had begun--I obtained
    the very cordial concurrence and help of Mr. Churchill and Mr.
    Lloyd George (Chancellor of the Exchequer) in an unparalleled
    building programme of 612 vessels of types necessary for a
    Big Offensive in Northern Waters (_the decisive theatre of
    the War_). Coal-burning Battleships then under construction
    were re-designed to burn oil, with great increase of their
    efficiency and speed, and the last two of these eight
    Battleships were scrapped (the “Renown” and “Repulse”), and,
    together with three new vessels--the “Courageous,” “Glorious,”
    and “Furious”--were arranged to have immense speed, heavy guns
    and unprecedented light draught of water, thus enabling them
    to fulfil the very work described in this letter below of
    absolutely disposing of hostile light cruisers and following
    them into shallow waters. They were also meant for service in
    the Baltic.

    Ever since their production became known, Naval critics in both
    Houses of Parliament (quite ignorant of new Naval strategical
    and tactical requirements) have consistently crabbed these
    new mighty Engines of War as the emanations of a sick brain,
    “_senile and autocratic_!” Hence the value of the following
    letter from an eyewitness of high rank:


_To Lord Fisher from a Naval Officer_

                                              _December 12th, 1917._

    DEAR LORD FISHER,

    In the late action in the Heligoland Bight the only heavy
    ships which could get up with the enemy were the “Repulse,”
    “Courageous” and “Glorious” (the “Renown” and “Furious” were
    elsewhere).[14] They very nearly brought off an important
    “coup!” Without them our light cruisers would not have had a
    “look in,” or perhaps would have been “done in!” When public
    speakers desired to decry the work of the Board of which you
    were a Member in 1914 and 1915, and particularly that part of
    the work for which you were so personally responsible as this
    new type of heavy ship, no condemnation was too heavy to heap
    on your design!

    It is a pleasure to me, therefore, to be able to let you know
    that they have fully justified your anticipation of their
    success.

    I trust you are quite well and will believe me,

                                                 Yours sincerely,
                                                               ----.


_Lord Fisher to a Friend._

                                                _August 22nd, 1917._

    MY BELOVED FRIEND,

    I am scanning the dark horizon for some faint glimmer of the
    end of the War. Not a sign of a glimmer! So far as the Germans
    are concerned, there is indisputable authority for stating
    that Germany is equal to a seven years’ war! Are we? So far,
    alas! we have had no Nelson, no Napoleon, no Pitt! The one
    only “substantial victory” of ours in the War (and, as Nelson
    wished, it was not a Victory--it was Annihilation!) was the
    destruction of Admiral von Spee’s Armada off the Falkland
    Islands.... And the above accomplished under the sole direction
    of a Septuagenarian First Sea Lord, who was thought mad for
    denuding the Grand Fleet of our fastest Battle Cruisers to
    send them 14,000 miles on a supposed wild goose chase....
    And how I was execrated for inventing the Battle Cruisers!
    “Monstrous Cruisers,” they called them! To this day such asses
    of this kidney calumniate them, and their still more wonderful
    successors, the “Repulse,” “Renown,” “Furious,” “Glorious,” and
    “Courageous.” How would they have saved England without these
    Fast Battle Cruisers?... And yet, dear friend, what comes to
    the Author of the Scene?

    The words of Montaigne!

    “Qui de nous n’a sa ‘terre promise,’
    Son jour d’extase,
    Et sa fin en exil?”

                                            Yours, etc.,
                                                    (Signed) FISHER.

    _Note._--Much talk of a recent _mot_ at a great dinner-table,
    where society’s hatred of Lord Fisher was freely canvassed, and
    his retirement (in May 1915) much applauded. “I did not know,”
    remarked a statesman, “that Mr. Pitt ever put Lord Nelson on
    the retired list.”


THE DREADNOUGHT BATTLE CRUISER.

The following imaginary dialogue I composed in 1904 to illustrate the
text that “Cruisers without high speed and protection are absolutely
useless”:--

“The ‘Venus,’ an Armoured Cruiser, is approaching her own Fleet at full
speed!

“Admiral signals to ‘Venus’: ‘What have you seen?’

“‘Venus’ replies: ‘Four funnels hull down.’

“Admiral: ‘Well, what was behind?’

“‘Venus’ replies: ‘Cannot say; she must have four knots more speed than
I had, and would have caught me in three hours, so I had to close you
at full speed.’

“Admiral’s logical reply: ‘You had better pay your ship off and turn
over to something that is some good; you are simply a device for
wasting 400 men!’”

The deduction is:

                           ARMOUR IS VISION.

So we got out the “Dreadnought” Battle Cruiser on that basis, and also
to fulfil that great Nelsonic idea of having a Squadron of very fast
ships to bring on an Action, or overtake and lame a retreating foe. And
in the great war this fast “Dreadnought” Battle Cruiser carried off all
the honours. She sank the “Blücher” and others, and also Admiral von
Spee at the Falkland Islands.

But the _sine qua non_ in these great Ships must ever be that they
carry the Biggest Possible Gun. It was for this reason that the 18-in.
gun was introduced in the Autumn of 1914[15] and put on board the new
Battle Cruiser “Furious”; and indeed all was completely arranged for
20-in. guns being placed in the succeeding proposed Battle Cruisers of
immense speed and very light draft of water and _possessing the special
merit of exceeding rapid construction_.

Alas! those in authority went back on it! It was precisely the same
argument that made these same retrograde Lot’s wives go back from oil
to coal. Coal, they said, was good enough and was so safe! Lot’s wife
thought of her toasted muffins. Notice now especially that if a man is
five per cent. before his time he may possibly be accounted a Genius!
but if this same poor devil goes ten per cent. better, then he’s voted
a Crank. Above that percentage, he is stark staring Mad.

(N.B.--I have gone through all these percentages!)


THE WAY TO VICTORY.

_Lord Fisher to the Prime Minister._

                                            HOUSE OF LORDS,
                                                  _June 12th, 1917_.

    MY DEAR PRIME MINISTER,

    In November, 1914, Sir John French came specially from France
    to attend the War Council to consider a proposal put forward
    by the Admiralty that the British Army should advance along
    the sea shore flanked by the British Fleet. Had this proposal
    been given effect to, the German Submarine Menace would have
    been deprived of much of its strength, and many Enemy Air
    Raids on our coast would have been far more difficult. The
    considerations which made me urge this proposal at that time
    have continuously grown stronger, and to-day I feel it my duty
    to press upon you the vital necessity of a joint Naval and
    Military operation of this kind. I do not feel justified in
    arguing the Military advantages which are, however, so obvious
    as to be patent to the whole world, nor the political advantage
    of getting in touch with Holland along the Scheldt, but solely
    from a Naval point of view the enterprise is one that ought to
    be undertaken with all our powers without further delay. The
    present occasion is peculiarly favourable, as we can call upon
    the support of the whole American Fleet.

                                          Yours truly,
                                                  (Signed) _Fisher_.

       *       *       *       *       *

                                      36, BERKELEY SQUARE,
                                            LONDON,
                                                  _July 11th, 1917_.

    MY DEAR PRIME MINISTER,

    In putting before your urgent notice the following two
    propositions, I have consulted no one, and seen no experts. It
    is the emanation of my own brain.

    Owing to two years of departmental apathy and inconceivable
    strategical as well as tactical blunders, we are wrongly raided
    in the air, and being ruined under water.

    I remember a very famous speech of yours where you pointed out
    that we had been fourteen times “Too Late!”

    This letter is to persuade you against two more “Too lates”:

    (1) The Air:

      You want two ideas carried out:

        (_a_) A multitude of bombing aircraft made like Ford cars (so
              therefore very expeditiously obtained thereby).

        (_b_) The other type of aircraft constantly improving to get
              better fighting qualities.

        The Air is going to win the War owing to the sad and grievous
              other neglects.

    (2) The Water:

        Here we have a very simple proposition. Now that America has
            joined us, we have a simply overwhelming sea preponderance!

        Are you not going to do anything with this?

Make the German Fleet fight, and you win the war!

How can you make the German Fleet fight? By undertaking on a huge
scale, with an immense Armada of special rapidly-built craft, an
operation that threatens the German Fleet’s existence!

That operation, on the basis in my mind, is one absolutely sure of
success, because the force employed is so gigantic as to be negligible
of fools.

If you sweep away the German Fleet, you sweep away all else and end the
War, as then you have the Baltic clear and a straight run of some 90
miles only from the Pomeranian Coast to Berlin, and it is the Russian
Army we want to enter Berlin, not the English or French.

                                                Yours truly,
                                                        (Signed) FISHER.


_Lord Fisher to a Friend._

                                              _February 28th, 1918._

    MY DEAR FRIEND, ...

    Quite recently we lost a golden opportunity of wrecking the
    residue of the German Fleet and wrecking the Kiel Canal,
    when the main German Fleet went to Riga with the German army
    embarked in a huge fleet of transports and so requiring all the
    Destroyers and Submarines of Germany to protect it.

    Well, in reply to your question, this is what I would do now:

    I would carry out the policy enunciated in the Print on the
    Baltic Project which was submitted early in the war[16] and
    again reverted to in my letter to the Prime Minister, dated
    June 2nd, 1916. Sow the North Sea with mines as thick as
    the leaves in Vallombrosa! That blocks effectually the Kiel
    Canal, if continued laying of these mines is always perpetually
    going on with damnable pertinacity! Then I guarantee to
    force a passage into the Baltic in combination with a great
    Military co-operation, but that co-operation must not be the
    co-operation of the Walcheren Expedition!

    “Lord Chatham with his sword drawn
    Was waiting for Sir Richard Strachan,
    Sir Richard, longing to be at ’em!
    Was waiting for the Earl of Chatham!”

    It has got to be chiefly a Naval Job! And the Army will be
    landed by the Navy! The Navy will guarantee landing the Army
    on the Coast of Pomerania and elsewhere. Three feints, any of
    which can be turned into a Reality.

    Further in detail I won’t go, but I can guarantee success.

    Have I ever failed yet? It’s an egotistical question, but I
    never have!

    What a d--d fool I should be to brag now if I wasn’t certain!

                                        Yours, etc.,
                                                    (Signed) FISHER.

    P.S.--I have heard some Idiots say that the Baltic Sea is now
    impregnable because of German mines in it. No earthly System of
    mines can possibly avoid being destroyed. We can get into the
    Baltic whenever we like to do so. I guarantee it.


“SOW THE NORTH SEA WITH MINES.”

(_Written in November, 1914_).

The German policy of laying mines has resulted in denying our access
to their harbours; has hampered our Submarines in their attempts to
penetrate into German waters; and we have lost the latest type of
“Dreadnought” (“Audacious”) and many other war vessels and over 70
merchant vessels of various sizes.

As we have only laid a patch of mines off Ostend (whose position we
have notified), the Germans have free access to our coasts to lay fresh
mines and to carry out raids and bombardments.

We have had, to our own immense disadvantage in holding up our
coastwise traffic, to extinguish the navigation lights on our East
Coast, so as to impede German ships laying mines. At times we have had
completely to stop our traffic on the East Coast because of German
mines; and the risk is so great that freights in some cases have
advanced 75 per cent.--quite apart from shortness of tonnage.

The Germans have laid mines off the North of Ireland, and may further
hamper movements of shipping in the Atlantic.

The German mine-laying policy has so hindered the movements of the
British Fleet, by necessitating wide detours, that to deal with a raid
such as the recent Hartlepool affair involves enormous risks, while
at the same time the German Fleet can navigate to our coast with the
utmost speed and the utmost confidence. They know that we have laid no
mines, and the position, of course, of their own mines is accurately
charted by them--indeed we know this as a fact. Our Fleet, on the
contrary, has to confine its movements to deep water, or slowly to
grope its way behind mine-sweeping vessels.

_There is no option but to adopt an offensive mine-laying policy._

It is unfortunate, however, that we have only 4,900 mines at present
available. On February 1st (together with 1,000 mines from Russia) we
shall have 9,110, and on March 1st we shall have 11,100 mines. This
number, however, is quite inadequate, but every effort is being made to
get more. Also FAST Mine-Layers are being procured, as the present ones
are very slow and their coal supply very small. So at present we can
only go very slow in mine-laying; but carefully selected positions can
be proceeded with.

We must certainly look forward to a big extension of German mine-laying
in the Bristol Channel and English Channel and elsewhere, in view of
Admiral Tirpitz’s recent statements in regard to attacking our commerce.

Neutral vessels now pick up Pilots at the German island of Sylt, and
take goods unimpeded to German ports--ostensibly carrying cotton,
but more probably copper, etc., and thus circumventing our economic
pressure.[17]

    _This would be at once stopped effectually by a mine-laying
    policy._

Nor could any German vessels get out to sea at speed as at present;
they would have to go slow, preceded by mine-sweeping vessels, and so
would be exposed to attack by our Submarines.

[Illustration: THE SUBMARINE MONITOR M 1,

which lately returned from a successful cruise in the Mediterranean.
She is designed to fight above or below water. She carries a 12-inch
gun firing an 850-lb. shell, which can be discharged when only the
muzzle of the gun is above water.]


A BIRTHDAY LETTER.

_Lord Fisher to a Friend._

                                               _January 25th, 1918._

    MY DEAR FRIEND,

    A letter to-day on my birthday from an eminent Engineer, cheers
    me up by saying that never has France been so vigorously
    governed as she is now by her present Prime Minister,
    Clemenceau, and that he is my age, 77.

    The Conduct of the War, both by Sea and Land, has been
    perilously effete and wanting in Imagination and Audacity since
    May, 1915.

    I know these words of mine give you the stomachache, but so did
    Jeremiah the Jews when he kept on telling them in his chapter
    v., verse 31:

    “The prophets prophesy falsely,
    And the priests [the unfit] bear rule by their means,
    And my people love to have it so,
    And what will ye do in the end thereof?”

    (Why! Send for Jephthah!)

             “And Jephthah said unto the elders of Gilead”

    (who came supplicating, asking him to come back as their
    captain)

    “Did ye not hate me and expel me?
    And why are ye come unto me now when ye are in distress?”

    And the elders of Gilead said unto Jephthah:

  “We turn again to thee now, that thou mayest go with us and fight!”

    By Sea, when the German Fleet took the German Army to Riga, we
    had a wonderful sure certainty of destroying the German Fleet
    and the Kiel Canal, but we let it slip because there were
    risks. (As if war could be conducted without risks!) Considered
    Rashness in war is Prudence, and Prudence in war is usually a
    synonym for imbecility!

    Observe the Mediterranean! The whole Sea Power of France and
    Italy is collected in the Mediterranean to fight the puny
    Austrian Fleet, but they haven’t fought it. Not only that, but
    hundreds of vessels of the English Navy are perforce out in the
    Mediterranean to aid them; and yet the German ships, “Goeben”
    and “Breslau,” known to be fast, powerful and efficient, emerge
    from the Dardanelles with impunity and massacre two of our
    Monitors--never meant to be out there and totally unfitted
    for such service--and two obsolete British Destroyers have to
    put up a fight! But God intervened and sent the “Goeben” and
    “Breslau” on top of mines. It was thus the act of God and not
    the act of our Sea Fools that kept these two powerful German
    ships from going to the coast of Syria, where they would have
    played Hell with Allenby and our Palestine Army.

    We have pandered to our Allies from the very beginning of the
    War, and yet practically we find most of the money and have
    found four million soldiers, and a thousand millions sterling
    lent to Russia have been lent in vain.

    You know as well as I do that our Expeditionary Force should
    have been sent in August, 1914, to Antwerp and not to France;
    we should then have held the Belgian Coast and the Scheldt, but
    this was too tame--we were all singing:

                    “Malbrook s’en va-t’en guerre!”

    The Baltic Project was scoffed at, though it had the
    impregnable sanction of Frederick the Great, and the project
    was turned down in November, 1914; and now the Germans, because
    of their possession of the Baltic as a German lake, are going
    to annex all the Islands they want that command Russia and
    Sweden, and the Russian Fleet, with its splendid “Dreadnoughts”
    and Destroyers disappear and eight British Submarines have been
    sunk. Ichabod!

                                                   Yours truly,
                                                             FISHER.


THE GERMAN SUBMARINE MENACE.

_Lord Fisher to a Friend._

                                                  _March 2nd, 1918._

    MY DEAR “MR. FAITHFUL,”

    You write anxious to have some connected statement in regard to
    the whole history of the German Submarine Menace.

    Now, the first observation thereon is the oft-repeated
    indisputable statement that no private person whatever can hope
    to fight successfully any Public Department. So even if you had
    the most conclusive evidence of effete apathy such as at first
    characterised the dealing with this German Submarine Menace,
    yet you would to the World at large be completely refuted by
    a rejoinder in Parliament of departmental facts. Nevertheless
    here is a bit of Naval History.

    In December, 1915, the Prime Minister (Mr. Asquith)
    unexpectedly came up to me in the Lobby of the House of
    Commons, and said he was anxious to consult me about Naval
    affairs, and he would take an early opportunity of seeing me!
    However, he must have been put off this for I never saw him.
    A month afterwards I pressed him in writing to see Sir John
    Jellicoe in regard to the paucity both of suitable apparatus
    and of suitable measures to cope with the German Submarine
    Menace; after much opposition the Prime Minister himself sent
    for Sir John Jellicoe and he appeared before the War Council.
    This is my Memorandum at that time, dated February 7th, 1916:


MEMORANDUM.

    “I have just heard that, notwithstanding the opposition to it,
    Sir John Jellicoe will attend the War Council at 11.30 a.m.
    next Friday. That he may have strength and power to overcome
    all ‘the wiles of the Devil’ is my fervent prayer.

    “That there has been signal failure since May, 1915, to
    continue the Great Push previous to that date of building fast
    Destroyers, fast Submarines, Mine Sweepers and small Craft
    generally is absolutely indisputable.

    “Above all, it was criminal folly and inexcusable on the part
    of the Admiralty to allow skilled workmen (20,000 of them)
    to be taken away from shipyards. Also it was inexcusable and
    weak to give up the Admiralty command of steel and other
    shipbuilding materials.

    “Kitchener instantly cancelled the order to take men from the
    shipyards when it was attempted by his subordinates while I was
    First Sea Lord. He saw the folly of it!

    “Again, deferring the shipbuilding that was in progress was
    fatuous. I saw myself two fast Monitors (each of them a
    thousand tons advanced) from which all the workmen had been
    called off. A few months afterwards there was feverish and
    wasteful haste to complete them. So was it with the five
    fast big Battle Cruisers of very light draught of water. All
    similarly delayed.

    “Well! Jellicoe, a ‘No Talker,’ at the War Council was opposed
    to a mass of ‘All Talkers,’ so he did not make a good fight;
    but when he got back to the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow he
    remembered himself and wrote a most excellent Memorandum, which
    put himself right.

    “However, a wordy war is no use; nothing but a cataclysm will
    stop our ‘Facilis descensus Averni.’”

    We must by some political miracle swallow up Korah, Dathan and
    Abiram and have a fresh lot. In Parliament we have nothing but
    the _suggestio falsi_ and the _suppressio veri_! A little bit
    of truth skilfully disguised:

    “A truth that’s told with bad intent,
    Beats any lie you can invent.”

    In reply to your question with reference to Mr. Bonar Law’s
    corrected statement in Hansard, the Printer’s date at the
    bottom of the Submarine Paper,[18] sent to the Prime Minister
    and First Lord of the Admiralty is January, 1914, seven months
    before the War.

                                                   Yours always,
                                                             FISHER.


_Lord Fisher to Sir Maurice Hankey, K.C.B., Secretary to the War
Cabinet._

                                             19, ST. JAMES’S SQUARE.

    MY DEAR HANKEY,

    In reply to your inquiry, my five points of peace (as regards
    Sea war only) are:

    (1) The German High Sea Fleet to be delivered up intact.

    (2) Ditto, every German Submarine.

    (3) Ditto, Heligoland.

    (4) Ditto, the two flanking islands of Sylt and Borkum.

    (5) No spot of German Territory in the wide world to be permitted!
          It would infallibly be a Submarine Base.

                                        Yours,
                                                        (Signed) FISHER,
                                            _October 21st, 1918_.
                                                       (Trafalgar Day).

Why we were not as relentless in carrying out our Peace requirements at
Sea as on Land is positively incomprehensible.

The German Fleet was not turned over and was afterwards sunk at
pleasure by the German crews. I don’t feel at all sure that every
German submarine, complete and incomplete, was handed over. Every
oil engine ought to have been cleared out of Germany. Through some
extraordinary chain of reasoning, absolutely incomprehensible, the
three Islands of Heligoland, Sylt and Borkum were not claimed and
occupied. In view of the prodigious development of Aircraft it was
imperative that these Islands should be in the possession of England.

All this to me is absolutely astounding. The British Fleet won the
War, and the British Fleet didn’t get a single thing it ought to have,
excepting the everlasting stigma amongst our Allies, of being fools,
in allowing the German Fleet to be sunk under our noses, because we
mistook the Germans for gentlemen.


_The Miracle of the Peace_

(_that took place at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th Month!_)
only equalled by the Destruction of Sennacherib’s Army, on the night
described in the 25th verse of the 19th chapter of Second Book of
Kings! The heading of the chapter is “_An Angel slayeth the Assyrians_.”

    “That night the Angel of the Lord went forth ... in the morning
    behold they were all dead corpses!”

A Cabinet Minister, in an article (after the Armistice) in a newspaper,
stated that the Allies were at their last gasp when the Armistice
occurred as it did as a Miracle! for Marshal Foch had been foiled on
the strategic flank by the inability of the American Army to advance
and the unavoidable consequences of want of experience in a new Army
(_immense but inexperienced--they were slaughtered in hecatombs and
died like flies!_) and so the American advance on the Verdun flank was
held up, and Haig therefore had to batter away instead (and well he did
it!). And though the British Army entered Mons, yet the German Army was
efficient, was undemoralised, and had immense lines of resistance in
its rear before reaching the Rhine! There was no Waterloo, no Sedan, no
Trafalgar (though there could have been one on October 21st, 1918, for
the German Naval Mutiny was known! Sir E. Geddes said so in a Mansion
House Speech on November 9th, 1918). There was no Napoleon--no Nelson!
but “The Angel of the Lord went forth....”


_Lord Fisher to a Friend._

                                                 _March 27th, 1918._

    MY DEAR BLANK,

    It has been a most disastrous war for one simple reason--that
    our Navy, with a sea supremacy quite unexampled in the history
    of the world (we are five times stronger than the enemy) has
    been relegated into being a “Subsidiary Service!”...

    What _crashes_ we have had

  Tirpitz--Sunk.
  Joffre--Stranded.
  Kitchener--Drowned.
  Lord French--     }
  Lord Jellicoe--   }  Made Viscounts.
  Lord Devonport--  }
  Fisher--Marooned.
  Sir W. Robertson--The “Eastern Command” in Timbuctoo.
  Bethmann-Hollweg--}
  Asquith--         }  Torpedoed.

    Heaven bless you! I am here walking 10 miles a day! and eating
    my heart out!

    And a host of minor prophets promoted. (We don’t shoot now! we
    promote!)

                                          Yours, etc.,
                                                    (Signed) FISHER.
                                                          27/3/18.


_To Lord Fisher from an Admirer._

                                              _21st November, 1918._

    DEAR LORD FISHER,

    We are just back after taking part in the most wonderful
    episode of the war, and my heart is very full, and I feel that
    the extraordinary surrender of the Flower of the German Fleet
    is so much due to your marvellous work and insight--in giving
    England the Fleet she has--that I must write you!

    I suppose the world will never again see such a sight--a line
    of 14 heavy, modern, capital ships, with their guns fore and
    aft in securing position, in perfect order and keeping good
    station, quietly giving themselves up without a blow or a
    murmur. Surely such a humiliating and ignominious end could
    never have been even thought of in all history past or present.

    Had I been in a private ship I would have used every endeavour
    to get you up to see the final fulfilment of your life’s work.
    As it is, I can’t think it was very gracious of the authorities
    not to have ensured your presence. But history will give you
    your due.

    Forgive this effusion, and please don’t bother to answer it.
    But _I_ realise that to-day’s victory was yours, and it is
    iniquitous that you were not here to see it.

                             Your affectionate and devoted admirer,
                                                               ----.


_To Lord Fisher from Admiral Moresby._

                                            FAREHAM,
                                                   _July 9th, 1918_.

    DEAR OLD FRIEND,

    Just a line. One of our “Article writing” Admirals sent me
    one of them on the progress of the war! Your name was not
    mentioned, nor your services alluded to! I returned it,
    saying it was the play without Hamlet. You might be wrong,
    or despised, but you could not be _ignored_. With our Navy
    revolutionised, Osborne created, obsolete cruisers scrapped,
    naval base shifted from Portland to Rosyth, Dreadnoughts and
    Battle Cruisers invented, Falkland Islands victory, and so on,
    he might as well talk of Rome without Cæsar. He replied and
    said you were an Enigma, and that covered it all! There is some
    truth in this, for such are all born leaders of men, from our
    Master, the greatest Enigma of all (who made thee thyself, who
    gave thee power to do these things), down to all who can see
    what is going on on the other side of the hill....

                                            Yours ever,
                                                (Signed) J. MORESBY.




POSTSCRIPT


Last night, in finishing off the examination of several boxes of old
papers, I came across a forgotten letter written a fortnight after the
Battle of Trafalgar from the “Dreadnought” (which ship participated
in the Battle). On mentioning it I was told there was a “Dreadnought”
in the Navy at the time of Henry VIII. I think one of the Docks at
Portsmouth dates from that time, and the “Dreadnought” may have been
docked in it. I love the delicious little touch at the end of this
letter where everyone seals their letters with black wax in memory
of Nelson, and the prayer and poetry are lovely. And where his
acquaintance in Collingwood’s Ship “had been shortened by the Hand of
Death,” and

    “Roll softly ye Waves,
    Blow gently ye Winds

    O’er the bosom of the deep where the bodies of the Heroes rest,
    until the Great Day, when all that are in their grave shall
    hear the Voice of the Son of God, when thou O Sea! shall give
    up thy dead to Life Immortal, and thou O Britain be grateful
    to thy defenders! that the Widows and Orphans of thy deceased
    Warriors be precious in thy sight--Soothe their sorrows,
    alleviate their distresses and provide for their wants by
    anticipating their wishes.”

(The Straits of Gibraltar the writer spells “_Streights_.”) He adds
“Our splendid Success has been dearly bought. Our gallant Chief is
dead. In the arms of Victory fell the greatest Hero that ever any age
or Nation ever produced.”




APPENDIX I

LORD FISHER’S GREAT NAVAL REFORMS

_By_ W. T. STEAD

    “He being dead yet speaketh.”--_Hebrews_ xi. 4.

[The following account of Lord Fisher’s Naval Reforms is extracted from
_The Review of Reviews_ for February, 1910.]


I briefly summarise Lord Fisher’s four great reforms:

1. The introduction of the nucleus crew system.

2. The redistribution of the fleets in accordance with modern
requirements.

3. The elimination of inefficient fighting vessels from the Active List
of the Navy.

4. The introduction of the all-big-gun type of battleship and
battleship-cruiser.

To these four cardinal achievements must be added the system of common
entry and training for all executive officers and the institution and
development of the Naval War College and the Naval War Staff.

By the nucleus crew system all our available ships of war are ready
for instant mobilisation. From two-fifths to three-fifths of their
complement, including all the expert and specialist ratings, are on
board, so that they are familiar with the ship and her armament. The
rest of the crew is held in constant readiness to come on board. Fisher
once aired, in after-dinner talk, the daring idea that the time would
come when the First Lord of the Admiralty would be supreme over the
War Office, and would, as in the days of the Commonwealth, fill up
deficiencies in ships’ crews by levies from the territorial forces.
Landsmen can serve guns as well as sailors.

The second great revolution was necessitated by the alteration in the
centre of international gravity occasioned by the growth of the German
Navy. Formerly the Mediterranean Fleet ranked first in importance. Now
the Home Fleet concentrates in its four divisions all the best fighting
ships we possess. It is hardly too much to say, as M. Hanotaux publicly
declared, that Admiral Fisher had, by concentration and redistribution,
magnified our fighting naval strength by an amount unparalleled
in a hundred years. That the fighting efficiency of the Fleet has
been doubled under Fisher’s _régime_ is to understate the facts. To
say it has been trebled would hardly be over the mark. And what is
the most marvellous thing of all is that this enormous increase of
efficiency was achieved not only without any increase of the estimates,
but in spite of a reduction which amounted to nearly five millions
sterling--three and a half millions actual and one and a half millions
automatic increase checked.

This great economy was largely achieved by the scrapping of ships too
weak to fight and too slow to run away. One hundred and fifty obsolete
and useless ships were removed from the effective list; some were
sold, others were broken up, while a third class were kept in store
for contingencies. They were lame ducks, all useless in war, costly
in peace, consuming stores, wasting the time of officers and men. The
obsolete ships were replaced on foreign stations by vessels which could
either fight or fly....

Of the introduction of the “Dreadnought” and super-“Dreadnoughts” I
have already spoken.

Apart from the above matters of high policy, a number of other reforms
or advances have been made during the past five years which are beyond
all criticism. Opinions may differ as to the details of some of these
services, but there is no dispute as to their immense contribution to
the fighting efficiency of the Navy. Some of these may be thus briefly
enumerated:

1. Complete reorganisation of the dockyards. [6,000 redundant workmen
discharged.]

2. Improved system of refits of ships, and limitation of number of
vessels absent at one time from any fleet for repair.

3. Introduction of the Royal Fleet Reserve, composed only of ratings
who have served for a period of years in the active service.

4. Improvements of Royal Naval Reserve, by enforcing periodical
training on board modern commissioned ships in place of obsolete hulks
or shore batteries.

5. Establishment and extension of Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve.

6. The establishment of a service of offensive mines and mine-laying
vessels.

7. The introduction of vessels for defensive mine-sweeping in harbours
and on the open sea.

8. A complete organisation of the service of auxiliary vessels for the
fleets in war.

9. The development of submarines, and the equipment of submarine bases
and all the necessary auxiliaries.

10. The proper organisation of the Destroyer Flotillas, with their
essential auxiliaries.

11. The enormous development of wireless telegraphy afloat, the
equipment of powerful shore stations round the coast and at the
Admiralty, and the introduction of a special corps of operators.

12. The experimental stage of aerial navigation entered upon.

13. The foundation of the Royal Naval War College and its development.

14. The establishment of Signal Schools at each port.

15. The establishment of a Navigation School.

16. Enormous advances in the Gunnery training and efficiency of the
Fleet.

17. Great improvements in torpedoes and in the torpedo training.

18. The introduction of a naval education and training for Engine Room
Artificers.

19. The introduction of the new rating of Mechanician for the Stoker
Class for engine-driving duties.

20. Complete reorganisation of the arrangements for mobilisation,
whereby every officer and man is always detailed by name for his
ship on mobilisation, and the mobilisation of the whole fleet can be
effected in a few hours.

21. The introduction of a complete system of intelligence of trade
movements throughout the world.

22. The stores of the Fleet put on a modern basis both
in the storehouses ashore and those carried in the ships
themselves--recognising the far different conditions now obtaining
to those of sailing-ship days of long voyages, necessitating larger
supplies being carried, and modern conditions of production and
supply enabling stores on distant stations and at home being rapidly
replenished. Some millions sterling were economised in this way with
increased efficiency, as the Fleet was supplied with up-to-date
articles; the only thing that gained by the age of the old system was
the rum.

23. The provision of repair ships, distilling plant, and attendant
auxiliaries to all fleets, and the preparation of plans elaborated in a
confidential handbook providing for all the auxiliary vessels required
in war.

In addition to all the above reforms great improvements have been
made in the conditions of service of officers and men, all tending to
increase contentment and thereby advance efficiency. Some of these are
as follows:

1. The introduction of two-year commissions, in place of three years
and often four [so that men were not so long away from their homes and
the crews of ships did not get stale].

2. Increases of pay to many grades of both officers and men--as
regards Commanders, the only increase since the rank was introduced.

3. Ship’s Bands provided by the Service, and a School of Music
established, and foreign musicians abolished.

4. The long-standing grievances of the men with regard to their
victualling removed. Improvements in cooking. Bakeries fitted on board
ships.

5. The Canteen system recognised and taken under Admiralty control, and
the old abuses abolished.

6. The clothing system reformed, and much expense saved to the men.

7. Great improvements effected in the position of Petty Officers.

8. An educational test instituted for advancement to Petty Officer.

9. Increase of pension granted to Chief Petty Officers.

10. Allotment stoppages abolished.

11. Allowances paid to men in lieu of victuals when on leave.

12. Promotions from the ranks to Commissioned Officer introduced.

13. Warrant rank introduced for the telegraphist, stoker, ship’s
steward, writer, ship’s police, and ship’s cook classes.

I print the foregoing from a return drawn up by an expert familiar with
details of the Service. To the general reader they will be chiefly
interesting as suggesting the immense and multifarious labours of
Admiral Fisher. It is not surprising that he found it necessary to
start work every morning at four o’clock.




APPENDIX II

SYNOPSIS OF LORD FISHER’S CAREER.


_Born January 25, 1841, at Rambodde, Ceylon._

Son of Captain William Fisher, 78th Highlanders, A.D.C. to the Governor
of Ceylon, and Sophia, daughter of A. Lambe, of New Bond Street, and
granddaughter of Alderman Boydell. His godmother was Lady Wilmot
Horton, wife of the Governor of Ceylon; and his godfather Sir Robert
Arbuthnot, Commanding the Forces in Ceylon.


_Entered the Royal Navy, June 13, 1854._

Received a nomination for the Navy from Admiral Sir William Parker, the
last of Nelson’s Captains. Joined his first ship, the “Victory,” at
Portsmouth, on July 12, 1854. The “Victory” was also the last ship to
fly his flag as an Admiral, October 20, 1904.

Served in Russian War, in Baltic (Medal) in “Calcutta” 84 guns.

Served in the China War, 1856–60, including the capture of Canton and
Peiho Forts. (China Medal, Canton and Taku Clasps.) Given command of
a small vessel by Admiral Sir James Hope, Commander-in-Chief, the
“Coromandel,” of which he was acting Captain at the age of 19.

Also served in “Highflyer,” Captain Shadwell; “Chesapeake,” Captain
Hilles; and “Furious,” Captain Oliver Jones. Returned home in 1861 from
the China Station.


_Lieutenant, November 4, 1860._

In passing for Lieutenant, he won the Beaufort Testimonial; and was
advanced to Mate on January 25, 1860, and confirmed as Lieutenant
within eleven months.


_March 28, 1863._

Appointed to H.M.S. “Warrior,” Captain the Hon. A. A. Cochrane, the
first seagoing ironclad, for gunnery duties. Served in her for three
and a half years.


_November 3, 1866._

Appointed to the Staff of H.M.S. “Excellent,” gunnery schoolship,
Portsmouth, Captain Arthur W. A. Hood.


_August 2, 1869._

Promoted to Commander, and appointed to the China flagship.


_September 19, 1872._

On returning from China in H.M.S. “Ocean,” was appointed to “Excellent”
for Torpedo Service. Started the “Vernon” as a Torpedo Schoolship.
Visited Fiume to arrange for the purchase of the Whitehead Torpedo.


_October 30, 1874._

Promoted to Captain, and re-appointed to “Excellent” for torpedo
service and instructional duties, remaining until 1876.


_November 16, 1876._

Appointed for special service in “Hercules,” flagship of Vice-Admiral
the Hon. Sir James Drummond, Commander-in-Chief, Mediterranean.


_March 15, 1877._

Appointed Flag-Captain to Admiral Sir A. Cooper-Key,
Commander-in-Chief, North American Station, in the “Bellerophon.”


_June 7, 1878._

Appointed Flag-Captain to Admiral Sir A. Cooper-Key, Commanding the
Particular Service Squadron, in the “Hercules.”


_January 1, 1879._

Appointed in command of the “Pallas,” corvette, on Mediterranean
Station, returning home in July. President of a Committee for the
revision of the “Gunnery Manual of the Fleet.”


_September 25, 1879._

Appointed Flag-Captain to Vice-Admiral Sir Leopold M’Clintock,
Commander-in-Chief, North American Station, in the “Northampton.”


_January 18, 1881._

Appointed to command the “Inflexible,” the largest ship in the Navy.


_July 11, 1882._

Took part in the bombardment of Alexandria. Afterwards landed with the
Naval Brigade at Alexandria. Arranged for the first “armoured train,”
and commanded it in various skirmishes with the enemy.


_August 14, 1882._

Awarded the C.B. for service at Alexandria; also Egyptian Medal, with
Alexandria Clasp; Khedive’s Bronze Star; Order of Osmanieh, 3rd Class;
etc.


_November 9, 1882._

Invalided home through illness contracted on active service.


_April 6, 1883._

Appointed in command of “Excellent,” gunnery schoolship.


_1884._

Collaborated with Mr. W. T. Stead in the production of “The Truth About
the Navy,” resulting in increased Navy Estimates and the opening of a
new era in the provision of an adequate Fleet.


_November 1, 1886._

Appointed Director of Naval Ordnance, occupying this post four and a
half years. Carried out the transfer of the control of naval ordnance
from the War Office to the Admiralty.


_August 2, 1890._

Promoted to Rear-Admiral.


_May 21, 1891._

Appointed Admiral-Superintendent of Portsmouth Dockyard. Expedited
the completion of the “Royal Sovereign,” first of a new type of
battleships. Acted as host when the French Squadron under Admiral
Gervais visited the Dockyard, 1891.


_February 1, 1892._

Appointed Third Sea Lord and Controller of the Navy, and served in the
administrations of Lord George Hamilton, Earl Spencer, and Mr. G. J.
Goschen as First Lords; and Admirals Sir A. Hood, Sir A. H. Hoskins
and Sir F. W. Richards as First Sea Lords. During this period the firm
stand of the Admiralty Board brought about the resignation of Mr.
Gladstone, March 3, 1894.


_May 26, 1894._

Appointed K.C.B.


_May 8, 1896._

Promoted to Vice-Admiral.


_August 24, 1897._

Hoisted his flag in H.M.S. “Renown” as Commander-in-Chief, North
American Station.


_1899._

Attended the first Hague Peace Conference as Naval Delegate.


_July 1, 1899._

Appointed Commander-in-Chief, Mediterranean Station, with his flag in
the “Renown,” remaining in this post until June 2nd, 1902. Admiral Lord
Beresford, Second-in-Command, says of this period in his “Memoirs”:
“While Vice-Admiral Sir John Fisher was Commander-in-Chief of the
Mediterranean Fleet, he greatly improved its fighting efficiency.
As a result of his representations, the stocks of coal at Malta and
Gibraltar were increased, the torpedo flotillas were strengthened, and
the new breakwaters at Malta were begun. Some of Sir John Fisher’s
reforms are confidential; but among his achievements which became
common knowledge, the following are notable: From a 12-knot Fleet with
breakdowns, he made a 15-knot Fleet without breakdowns; introduced
long range target practice, and instituted the Challenge Cup for heavy
gun shooting; instituted various war practices for officers and men;
invited, with excellent results, officers to formulate their opinions
upon cruising and battle formation; drew up complete instructions
for torpedo flotillas; exercised cruisers in towing destroyers and
battleships in towing one another, thereby proving the utility of
the device for saving coal in an emergency; and generally carried
into execution Fleet exercises based, not on tradition, but on the
probabilities of war.”


_1900._

Received from the Sultan of Turkey the 1st Class of the Order of
Osmanieh.


_November 2, 1901._

Promoted to Admiral.


_June 5, 1902._

Returned to the Admiralty as Second Sea Lord, remaining until August
31, 1903, with Lord Selborne, First Lord, and Admiral Lord Walter Kerr,
First Sea Lord.


_June 26, 1902._

Appointed G.C.B. in the Coronation Honours List.


_December 25, 1902._

Launched new scheme of naval entry and education for officers, with
training colleges at Osborne and Dartmouth.


_May 2, 1903._

Made his first public speech at the Royal Academy Banquet.


_August 31, 1903._

Appointed Commander-in-Chief at Portsmouth, in order to supervise
personally the inauguration of his new education scheme at Osborne
College. Also energetically promoted the formation and development of
the first British submarine flotilla.


_November 7, 1903._

Appointed member of Committee with Lord Esher and Colonel Sir George
Clarke (Lord Sydenham) to reorganise the War Office on the lines of the
Admiralty Board.


_October 21, 1904._

Appointed First Sea Lord in Lord Selborne’s administration, and held
this office for five years and three months, the period of his greatest
activity and his preparation for a war with Germany. Some of the more
notable of his many reforms are dealt with in his “Memories.”

Also appointed, October 21, 1904, First and Principal Naval
Aide-de-Camp to King Edward VII.


_December 6, 1904._

Admiralty Memorandum on the Distribution of the Fleet, introducing
nucleus crew system for ships in reserve, and withdrawing obsolete
craft from foreign stations.


_January, 1905._

Committee appointed to inquire into the reorganisation of the
dockyards.


_March 6, 1905._

Appointment of Rear-Admiral Percy Scott to newly-created post of
Inspector of Target Practice. By this and other means, including the
service of Captain J. R. Jellicoe as Director of Naval Ordnance, the
marksmanship of the Navy was vastly improved.


_December 4, 1905._

Awarded the Order of Merit, and promoted by Special Order in Council to
be an additional Admiral of the Fleet, thus giving him five more years
on the active list in order to carry out his policy.


_February 10, 1906._

Launch of the “Dreadnought,” the first all-big-gun and turbine-driven
battleship, as recommended by the Admiralty Committee on Design
presided over by the First Sea Lord (Sir John Fisher).


_November, 1906._

Establishment of the Naval War College at Portsmouth.


_January, 1907._

Institution of a service of Fleet Auxiliaries--ammunition and store
ships, distilling and hospital ships, fleet repair ships, fishing
trawlers as, mine sweepers, etc., etc., etc., etc.,


_March, 1907._

Creation of a new Home Fleet, with the “Dreadnought” as flagship for
service in the North Sea.


_August, 1907._

New scheme of advancement and pay of naval ranks and ratings
introduced.


_September, 1907._

Establishment of a wireless telegraphy branch, and installation erected
on the Admiralty building.


_November 9, 1907._

Speech at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet, assuring his countrymen that they
could sleep quietly in their beds, and not be disturbed by invasion
bogeys.


_June, 1908._

Visited Reval with King Edward and Queen Alexandra on their visit to
the Tsar of Russia. Awarded G.C.V.O. on the conclusion of this cruise.


_June 17, 1908._

Created honorary LL.D. of Cambridge University.


_June, 1909._

Entertained delegates to Imperial Press Conference at a review of the
Fleet at Spithead, and a display of submarines, etc.


_December 7, 1909._

Raised to the peerage as Baron Fisher of Kilverstone, in the County of
Norfolk, after the manor bequeathed to his only son by the late Mr.
Josiah Vavasseur, C.B.


_January 25, 1910._

Retired from office of First Sea Lord, and was succeeded by Admiral of
the Fleet Sir Arthur Wilson, but remained a member of the Committee
of Imperial Defence. Recording his retirement in the First Lord’s
Memorandum, dated March 4, 1910, Mr. Reginald McKenna said: “The
measures which are associated with his name and have been adopted by
several successive Governments will prove of far-reaching and lasting
benefit to the Naval Service and the country.”


_March 10, 1910._

Took the oath and his seat in the House of Lords.


_May 24, 1912._

Visited at Naples by Mr. Churchill (the new First Lord) and Mr. Asquith
(Prime Minister).


_July 30, 1912._

Appointed Chairman of the Royal Commission on Oil Fuel and Oil Engines
for the Navy.


_September 7, 1914._

Appointed Honorary Colonel of the First Naval Brigade, Royal Naval
Division.


_October 30, 1914._

Recalled to the Admiralty as First Sea Lord.


_December 8, 1914._

Victory of Admiral Sir Doveton Sturdee over Admiral Count von Spee,
due to the prompt dispatch from England of two battle-cruisers
immediately on receipt of the news of the Coronel disaster. This was
the most decisive battle of the war, the German force being practically
annihilated.


_January 24, 1915._

Action of Sir David Beatty off the Dogger Bank, and sinking of the
“Blücher” another striking success of the battle-cruiser design.


_May 15, 1915._

Resignation as First Sea Lord over the Dardanelles question.


_July 5, 1915._

Appointed Chairman of the Board of Invention and Research.


_November 16, 1915._

First speech in House of Lords, in reference to Mr. Churchill’s speech
on the previous day, following the latter’s resignation from Cabinet.


_March 21, 1917._

Second speech in House of Lords, declaring his refusal to discuss
Dardanelles report during the war.

Awarded the Grand Cordon, with Paulownia, of the Japanese Order of the
Rising Sun.


_May 5, 1919._

Speech at the luncheon to Mr. Josephus Daniels, U.S. Naval Secretary.


_October 21_ (Trafalgar Day), _1919._

Publication of “Memories.”


_December 8_ (Falkland Islands Day), _1919._

Publication of “Records.”




FOOTNOTES


[1] _Was that our Sea Policy during the War?_ Did we not keep our Fleet
in cotton wool?

[2] These mottoes were painted up in my first ship, and I have had them
in every ship I have commanded since.

[3] ONE SAMPLE OUT OF MANY.--“Lord Tweedmouth and Mr. Robertson, having
tasted blood in their reduction of this year’s Estimates, are about
to strike a blow at the vital efficiency of the Navy. But what are we
to think of the naval officers on the Admiralty Board, men who cannot
plead the blindness and ignorance of their civilian colleagues? No one
knows better than Sir John Fisher the real nature and the inevitable
consequences of those acts to which he is a consenting party. And we
are not speaking at random when we assert that more than any one man,
the responsibility and the guilt for those reductions lies at his
door.” (The _Globe_, 21 Sept. 1906.)

[4] This was written in October, 1906.

[5] Not reprinted.

[6] There are two alternative schemes which may possibly be preferred
to this.

[7] The “Pegasus” was massacred at Zanzibar by the Germans!--F. 1919.

[8] For these predictions, see Letter to Lord Esher of (?) Jan., 1904
“Memories,” p. 173.

[9] See below, p. 181.

[10] Only this morning (November 5th, 1919), I have arranged to deal
with the drawings of a proposed Submersible Battleship carrying many
Big Guns, and clearly a practicable production.

[11] NOTE.--For steam raising 3 tons of oil are only equivalent to 4
tons of coal.

[12] The War stopped this.--F. 1919.

[13] This was said in 1910, and Mr. Asquith did leave office as here
predicted, in November, 1916, six years afterwards! And Sir John
Jellicoe took command of the Grand Fleet forty-eight hours before war
was declared, and the war with Germany did break out as predicted in
1914!

[14] These are the five Battle Cruisers built on my return to the
Admiralty in 1914–1915.

[15] This 18-in. gun was ordered by me without any of the usual
preliminary trials or any reference to any Gunnery Experts whatever.
The credit of its great success is due to Major Hadcock, Head of the
Elswick Ordnance Manufacturing Department, who also designed the 20-in.
gun for the fast Battleship Type which was to have been built had I
remained at the Admiralty in May, 1915.

A model of this 20-in. gun Battle Cruiser of 35 knots speed, was got
out before I left the Admiralty--three days more they would have
started building.

[16] See Chapter XV.

[17] The Foreign Office would not permit an efficient blockade, and
the outrageous release of vessels carrying war-helping cargoes caused
intense dissatisfaction in the fleet. No vessels ever passed our chain
of Cruisers without detention and examination.

[18] See Chapter XI.




INDEX


  A

  Action, 45

  Adams, John Couch, 21

  Admiralty House, Portsmouth, King Edward’s visit to, 24, 25

  Admiralty policy: replies to criticisms, 98 _et seq._

  Alcester, Lord, 30

  Alderson, General, 54

  Alexandria, bombardment of, 63, 256

  Allan, Sir William, 88

  Allenby, Lord, 241

  American advance on Verdun, 246

  Animated biscuits, 8

  Arabi Pasha, 30

  Arbuthnot, Sir Robert, 261

  Archbishop and the pack of cards, the, 32

  Armoured trains, institution of, 30

  Ascension, the, 45

  Asquith, Rt. Hon. H. H., 65, 179, 194, 214, 222, 242, 247, 269

  Augé, M., 59

  Automatic dropping mines for ocean use, 223–224

  Aylesford, Lord, 3


  B

  Bacon, Admiral Sir Reginald, 128, 181;
    on the big gun, 204–206

  Baker, Mrs., Lord Fisher’s cook, 25;
    invited to Buckingham Palace by King Edward, _ibid._

  Balfour, Rt. Hon. A. J., 56, 65, 98

  Balliol College, Oxford, 2

  Baltic project, the, 217 _et seq._, 236, 241

  Battle hymn of the American Republic, the, 77, 78

  Beatty, Earl, 269

  Beaufort Testimonial, won by Lord Fisher, 255

  Beaumont, Admiral Sir Lewis, 30

  Beilby, Sir George, 66

  Benbow, Sir Henry, letter of, to Lord Fisher, 171

  Beresford, Admiral Lord Charles, on training of officers and men for
        the Navy, 167–170;
    265

  Bethmann-Hollweg, Herr von, 247

  Bible, the, and other reflections, 38 _et seq._;
    Wyclif’s translation, 43;
    Tyndale’s, _ibid._;
    Coverdale’s, 44;
    Authorised, _ibid._;
    Revised, _ibid._;
    Cranmer’s “Great Bible,” _ibid._

  Big gun, the, 204 _et seq._

  Birthday Honours List a serial novel, 73

  Black, Dr. Hugh, 38, 39, 77

  Boar, Mr., 128

  Board of Invention and Research, 193, 269

  Bodmin, ancestral home of the Fishers, 3

  Borden, Sir Robert, and hereditary titles in Canada, 72

  Borkum, 245

  Bourke, Mr. Maurice, 95

  Boydell, Alderman, 1, 261

  Boys, training of, for the Navy, 166

  Brampton, Lord, 26, 31, 33

  Brest, blockade of, 6

  Bright, John, 69, 70

  British submarines before and during the war, 186

  Brodrick, Mr., 83

  Browning, Sir Thomas, 201

  Brutality in the Navy, former, 10

  Buonaparte, Napoleon, Archbishop Whately, on, 100

  Burnham, the first Lord, 31, 32, 33

  “Buying up opportunities,” 61 _et seq._

  Byron, Lord, 4


  C

  Cabman’s retort to the Admiral, the, 52

  Campbell-Bannerman, Rt. Hon. Sir Henry, 31, 32, 51, 53

  Canada and hereditary titles, Sir Robert Borden on, 73

  Cape Observatory, the, 124

  Capri, 41

  Cawdor, Lord, 98

  Cawdor memorandum, the, 107, 117

  Childers, Rt. Hon. Hugh, 56, 139

  China Seas, an Admiral’s unique manner of surveying, 9

  Chinese, the ingenious, 9

  Christmas Day joys on a man-of-war, 22

  Churchill, Rt. Hon. Winston, 86, 179, 188, 191, 192, 194, 230, 269,
        270

  Clarke, Sir George, 266

  Claverhouse, 78

  Clemenceau, M., 240

  Clive, Lord, 74

  Coastguard, service, the, 120 _et seq._

  Cochrane, Captain the Hon. A. A., 262

  Collingwood, Admiral, 90, 92

  Commerce, the submarine and, 183–185

  Common entry into the Navy, 156 _et seq._

  Congreve, William, 92

  Cooper-Key, Admiral Sir A., 262

  Corbett, Sir Julian, 34

  Cornwallis, Admiral, 6, 90

  Coronel, 261

  Coverdale, Miles, 42, 43, 44

  Cowdray, Lord, 196

  Cranmer’s Bible, 43, 44

  Cromwell, Thomas, 42, 43, 44

  Currie, General, 74

  Curzon, Earl, 193


  D

  Dalby, Prof., 193

  Daniels, Mr. Josephus, 79;
    report on oil-burning battleships, 203, 270

  Davies, Mr., American dentist to the Kaiser, 75

  Dawson, Sir Trevor, 189

  Defects and repairs, 112 _et seq._

  Democracy, 69 _et seq._

  Deterding, Mr., 200, 201

  Devonport, Viscount, 247

  Diesel, Dr., 197

  Dilke, Sir C., 102

  Disraeli, Mr., 20

  Diving methods of the Chinese, 9

  Dogger Bank, 269

  “Dreadnought” and “Invincible,” the, 109

  Dreadnought battle cruiser, the, 232–233

  Drumclog, 78

  Drummond, Admiral the Hon. Sir James, 262


  E

  Eardley-Wilmot, Admiral Sir Sydney, 210

  Edison, Mr., 21

  Edmunds, Mr. Henry, 21, 22

  Empress of Russia, Dowager, 29

  “Equal opportunity for all,” 71 _et seq._

  Esher, Lord, 11, 53, 173, 266

  Essentials of sea fighting, the, 88 _et seq._


  F

  Falkland Islands, 66

  Fisher Baronetcy, lapse of, 2

  Fisher’s career, Lord, synopsis of, 255 _et seq._

  Fisher, Sir Clement, 2, 3

  Fisher, John, 2

  Fisher, Rev. John, of Bodmin, 3;
    four generations of, 4

  Fisher, Mr. John Arbuthnot, 5

  Fisher, Sir Robert, of Packington, 3

  Fisher, Sir Robert, 4

  Fisher, William, father of Lord Fisher, 261

  Fisher, Mary, wife of Lord Aylesford, 3

  Fisher motto, the, 2

  Fiume, 256

  “Fleet Street” conspiracy, a, 101

  Foch, Marshal, 246

  Forgiveness, 49

  “Free Tank Day,” a, 22

  Frederick the Great and the Seven Years’ War, 217, 218

  Freedom of the seas nonsense, 75

  French, Lord, 247

  Friedland-Eylau campaign, 221

  Friend, Lord Fisher’s letter to a, 76

  Fushishima, Prince, 227


  G

  Gallifet, General, 31

  Gard, Mr., 128

  Gardiner, Mr. A. G., 11

  Gaunt, John of, 96

  Geddes, Sir Eric, 67, 246

  German Emperor, the, 227, 230

  German submarine menace, the, 65, 242

  Gervais, Admiral, 264

  Ginsburg, Dr., letter from Lord Fisher to, 41

  Gladstone, Rt. Hon. W. E., final resignation of, 50 _et seq._, 264

  Goodenough, Commodore, 211

  Gould, Sir F. C., 36

  Goschen, Rt. Hon. G. J., 264

  Gracie, Mr., 128

  Grafton, Richard, printer of the 1539 Bible, 38

  Grant, Sir Hope, 17

  Graves, Admiral, 7

  “Great Silent Navy,” the, 95, 96

  Greenwich Observatory, 124

  Gunboat, the use of the, 116 _et seq._

  Gunning, Miss, wife of two dukes and mother of four, 5, 6


  H

  Hadcock, Major A. G., 210, 233

  Hamilton, Duke of, 5

  Hamilton, Lady, 1, 6

  Hamilton, Lord George, 54, 264

  Hankey, Sir Maurice P. A., 173;
    letter to Lord Fisher, 214–215;
    letter of Lord Fisher to, 244

  Hanotaux, M., 250

  Harcourt, Lord, 53

  Harcourt, Rt. Hon. Sir William, 51, 52, 53

  Hawke, Admiral, Capt. A. T. Mahan on, 91

  Hawkins, Sir Henry, _see_ Brampton, Lord

  Hay, General, commandant of the Hythe School of Musketry, 17, 18

  Heligoland Bight, a Naval Officer, on the battle of, 230, 245

  Henderson, Wilfrid, 128

  Hereditary titles out of date, 73;
    Canada and, _ibid._

  Hicks-Beach, Rt. Hon. Sir Michael, 51

  Hilles, Captain, 261

  Hole, Dean, 65

  Hood, Captain Arthur W. A., 262

  Hood, Sir H., 262, 264

  Hope, Sir James, 14, 15, 261

  Hopkins, Sir John, 170;
    letter of, to Lord Fisher, _ibid._

  Horton, Lady Wilmot, 4, 261

  Hoskins, Sir A. H., 264

  Hostile submarines, 183

  House of Lords, Lord Fisher’s speech in, November, 1915, 86;
    March 21, 1917, 87

  How the Great War was carried on, 64 _et seq._

  Howe, Julia Ward, 77

  Hunger and thirst the way to Heaven, 10

  Huxley, T. H., 42

  Hythe School of Musketry, the, 17


  I

  Incarnation of Revolution, Lord Fisher as the, 20

  Inge, Dean, 28, 47, 48

  Ireland under military law, 31


  J

  Jackson, Sir Henry, 128

  Jellicoe, Viscount, 128, 214, 215, 223, 226, 242, 243, 247, 267

  Joffre, General, 247

  “Jolly and Hustle,” 58 _et seq._

  Jonah’s Gourd, 97 _et seq._

  Jones, Captain Oliver, 15, 16, 17, 261


  K

  Keble, John, 19

  Kelvin, Lord, 21, 61, 62, 63

  Kerr, Lord Walter, 265

  Kiel Canal, 214, 236, 237, 240

  King Edward, 4, 24;
    characteristic thoughtfulness of, 25–27;
    his friendship for Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, 32;
    57, 60, 180, 227, 266, 268

  King William IV, 1

  Kitchener, Lord, 54, 229, 243, 247

  Knollys, Lord, 24

  Knox, Sir Ralph, 55

  Krupp, 196, 197, 199


  L

  Labouchere, Mr. Henry, 31, 32

  Lambe, A., grandfather of Lord Fisher, 261

  Lambe, Sophia, mother of Lord Fisher, 261

  Lane, Jane, 2

  Latimer, Bishop, 211

  Laurier, Sir Wilfrid, 73

  Law, Rt. Hon. Bonar, 244

  League of Nations nonsense, 75

  Lectures to officers of the Fleet, 89 _et seq._

  “Let ’em all come,” 81

  Lethbridge, Captain, 11

  Leverrier, Urbain, 21

  Lloyd George, Rt. Hon., 77;
    letter from Lord Fisher to, 222–223; 230

  Lloyd’s, 125

  Lochee, Lord, _see_ Robertson, Mr. Edmund

  “Loop Detection” scheme, the, 67

  Lord Mayor’s Banquet 1907, the, Lord Fisher’s speech at, 83

  Loreburn, Lord, 31

  Lucy, Sir Henry, 36, 37


  M

  M’Clintock, Admiral Sir Leopold, 263

  McCrea, Admiral, 59

  McKechnie, Sir James, 189

  McKenna, Rt. Hon. Reginald, 268

  McLaughlin, A. C., Professor of History at Chicago, 69, 73, 74

  Madden, Admiral, 128

  Mahan, Capt. A. T., 90, 91;
    on Nelson, 135

  Marienbad, 29, 30, 32, 34, 36

  Marlborough, Duke of, 74

  Masterton-Smith, Sir J. E., 34

  Memorandum on “Oil and its Fighting Attributes,” 200

  Men, training of, for the Navy, 166

  Mercantile Marine, the, 125

  Midleton, Lord, _see_ Brodrick, Mr.

  Midshipman and the Admiral, the, Mr. A. G. Gardiner’s story of, 11, 12

  Midshipmen’s food, 6

  Midshipmen past and present, comparison between, 7, 8

  Miller, Captain, 11

  Mitchell, Dr. Weir, 46

  Mons, 246

  “Monstrous” cruisers, the, 230, 232

  Montecuccoli, Admiral Count, Austrian Minister of Marine, 180

  Moresby, Admiral J., 248

  Morley, Rt. Hon. John, on the Navy, 1893, 135

  Morley, Lord, “Life of Gladstone,” 50

  Motto, a Fisher, 2


  N

  Napoleon, 74, 129;
    Friedland-Eylau campaign, 221;
    231

  Napoleon III, 179

  Nargen, Island of, 8

  National Lifeboat Institution as substitute for Coastguard, 123

  Naval base reforms, 249 _et seq._

  Naval candidate’s essay, a, 171–172

  Naval captain and cavalry colonel, 17

  Naval education, 156 _et seq._

  Naval officer, a, on the battle of Heligoland Bight, 230

  Navigation, ignorance of, in the Navy, 19

  Navy, common entry into, 156 _et seq._

  Navy in the war, the, 225 _et seq._

  Nelson, 1, 6, 19, 81, 83, 129, 231, 232;
    Capt. A. T. Mahan on, 135;
    at Toulon, 136

  Northbrook, Lord, 30

  Nucleus crews, 147


  O

  Observatories, 124 _et seq._

  Obsolete vessels, purging the Navy of, 139 _et seq._

  Officers, training of, for the Navy, 166;
    Lord Charles Beresford on, 167–170

  Oil and oil engines, 189 _et seq._

  Oil-burning battleships, Mr. Josephus Daniels’ report on, 203

  Organisation for war, 133

  Osborne system of Naval education, 7, 157, 248

  “Out of date” fighting ships, 130


  P

  Paganini, 164

  Page-Roberts, Dr., Dean of Salisbury, 49

  Pakenham, Admiral, 110, 208

  Parker, Admiral Sir William, last of Nelson’s captains, nominates
        Lord Fisher for the Navy, 4, 261

  Parkes, Mr. Oscar, 208

  Parsons, Hon. Sir Charles, 66, 197

  Peace, 74, 75

  Pechili, Gulf of, 16

  Penniless, friendless and forlorn, Lord Fisher’s entry into the Navy,
        10

  Plumer, General, 173

  Pope, the, and Tyndale, 43, 44

  Pre-war prophecy, a, 227

  Public speeches, 79 _et seq._

  Purging the Navy of obsolete vessels, 139 _et seq._


  Q

  Queen Alexandra, her kindly disposition, 26;
    28, 29, 268

  Queen Elizabeth, 135

  Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia, 34

  Queen Victoria, 30, 55


  R

  Rambodde, Ceylon, Lord Fisher’s birthplace, 255

  Redesdale, Lord, 25, 26

  Redmond, John, 31

  Redmond, William, 31

  Redundant dockyard workmen, discharge of, 56, 57

  Resentment, 46

  Retrospect, a (July, 1906), 150 _et seq._

  Reval, 268

  Rhodes, Cecil, 28

  Richards, Sir Frederick, 50, 51;
    cabman’s retort to, 52;
    264

  Ridley, Bishop, 211

  Riga, 236

  Ripon, Lord, 53

  Roberts, Lord, 36

  Robertson, Mr. Edmund, 98, 101 _n._

  Robertson, Rev. F. W., of Brighton, 46, 47, 49

  Robertson, Sir W., 247

  Rombulow-Pearse, Lieut., 159

  Royal Academy Banquet, 1903, the, Lord Fisher’s speech at, 79

  Royal Dutch-Shell Combination, the, 201

  Royal Marines, Lord Charles Beresford on the, 168–169

  Rozhdestvensky, Admiral, 207

  Rumbold, Sir H. G. M. (Ambassador at Vienna), 31, 33

  Russell, Lord, 31, 32, 33

  Russian catastrophe, the reason of the, 228

  Russian War, the, 1854–5, 8


  S

  Saintly Naval captain, a, 12, 13, 14

  Salisbury, Lord, 54, 55, 88

  Salt-beef snuff-box, a, 10

  Samuel, Sir Marcus, 193

  Sankey, Mr., 77

  Satanic captain, a, 15

  Scapa Flow, 225–226, 243

  Schwab, Mr., 187

  Schwarzhoff, General Gross von, 55

  Science, contempt for, in the Navy, 19

  Scott, Admiral Percy, 80, 81, 267

  Sea of Japan, battle of, 111

  Sea-gull, a delicacy, 16

  Secrecy and secretiveness, 93 _et seq._

  Selborne, Lord, 101;
    letter of Sir John Fisher to, 127; 265, 266

  Seven Years’ War, the, 217, 218, 222

  Shadwell, Captain, 12, 13, 14, 261

  Shadwell, Sir Lancelot, last Vice-Chancellor of England, 12

  Shand, Lord, 31, 33

  Ship-building and dockyard workers, 56 _et seq._

  Siegel, Admiral von, 55

  “Sleep quiet in your beds,” speech at Lord Mayor’s banquet, 1907, 85

  Smith, Rt. Hon. W. H., 54

  “Snail and Tortoise Party,” the, 212

  Snuff-box of salt beef, 10

  Some predictions, 211

  “Sow the North Sea with mines,” Lord Fisher’s advice in 1914, 237–239

  Spee, Admiral von, 66, 206, 232, 233, 269

  Spencer, Earl, 50, 51, 52, 264

  Spencer, Herbert, 42

  Staal, M. de, 55

  Standard Oil Trust, America, 201

  State education in the Navy, 160–162

  Stead, Mr. W. T., 52, 53, 55;
    on Lord Fisher’s great naval reforms, 253 _et seq._;
    263

  Stewart, Mr., “Jolly and Hustle,” 61

  Stolypin, M., 222

  Sturdee, Admiral Sir Doveton, 269

  Submarine boat, the, 82

  Submarine and commerce, the, 183–185

  Submarines, 173 _et seq._

  Submarines and oil fuel, 179–181

  Submarines, British, before and during the war, 186

  Subsidiary services of war, 148 _et seq._

  Swan, Mr., inventor of the incandescent light, 21

  Sydenham, Lord, _see_ Clarke, Sir George.

  Sylt, 245


  T

  Taylor, Bishop Jeremy, 46

  Tennyson-d’Eyncourt, Sir Eustace, 208

  Tepl, monks’ colony at, 29

  Thackeray, 79

  “The World, the Flesh, and the Devil,” 33

  Thomson, Sir J. J., O.M., 65

  Thurlow, Major, 1

  Thursfield, Mr. J. R., 160

  Tirpitz, Admiral von, 225, 247

  Titles, hereditary, and Canada, 73

  Togo, Admiral, 110, 174, 207, 226, 227

  Training of boys for the Navy, 166

  Training of men for the Navy, 166;
    Lord Charles Beresford on the, 167–170

  Training of officers for the Navy, 166, 167–169

  Tsar of Russia, 268

  Tweedmouth, Lord, 98, 101 _n._

  Twiss, General, 89

  Two-Power standard, the, 13, 105

  Tyndale, John, 42, 43, 44


  U

  Uruguay, 119

  Use of the gunboat, the, 116 _et seq._


  V

  Vavasseur, Mr. Josiah, 268

  Verdun, 5;
    American advance on, 246

  “Victory,” the, Lord Fisher’s first and last ship, 4, 5

  Villeneuve, Admiral, 89

  Vladivostok, 110, 111


  W

  War, organisation for, 133

  War, subsidiary services of, 148 _et seq._

  Warsaw, Napoleon at, 129

  Watch, a historic, 3

  Watson, Sir William, 78

  Way to Victory, the, Lord Fisher’s letters to the Prime Minister,
        234–236

  Wellington, Lord, 74

  Wesley, John, 46

  Whately, Archbishop, 99, 100

  Whitchurch, Edward, printer of the 1539 Bible, 38

  Whitehead torpedo, 177, 262

  Wilson, Sir Arthur, 268

  Wilson, President, 77

  Winchester, Bishop of, 114

  Wireless Telegraphy, 82

  Wotton, Sir Henry, 34

  Wyclif, John, 42, 43


  Y

  Yamamoto, Admiral, 226

  Yates, Edmund, 31, 32

  Youthful midshipmen, advantage of, 5, 7;
    arduous lives of, 6


          PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY R. CLAY AND SONS, LTD.,
    BRUNSWICK STREET, STAMFORD STREET, S.E. I, AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.




Transcriber’s Notes


Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation
marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left
unbalanced.

Illustrations in this eBook have been positioned between paragraphs
and outside quotations. In versions of this eBook that support
hyperlinks, the page references in the List of Illustrations lead to
the corresponding illustrations.

Footnotes, originally at the bottoms of the pages that referenced them,
have been sequentially renumbered and moved to the end of the book,
just before the Index.

The index was not checked for proper alphabetization or correct page
references.

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 69497 ***